LA 3/87, sync. sound memento of West Coast visit (Buddy K., the desert, Filmforum, Hollywood). Cited by Howard Guttenplan as one of the outstanding films of the 1988 Exit Art Int'l Forum of S8mm, New York; WILDWOOD 2/88, a Sunday/winter drive to the Jersey shore and back. Two films on one reel.

A continuation of some of the concerns of my ITALIAN PLACES series (spontaneous, in-camera responses to place and situation) with the addition of the layering of images and sounds -- through AB printing -- which the overwhelmingly sensuous plentitude (paradoxical in a place that has whispered "Death" to so many) of Venice suggested.
"Venise dousse son plaiser tout de suite." -- Jean Cocteau

PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE began in June of 1966 and was completed one year later. The first footage (in B&W) was shot at Foothill Junior College in Los Altos Hills as a course project. After graduation (and during!), I continued shooting until leaving for my three-month trek through the High Sierras. My mountain footage is a complete other trip, a microcosm of which is incorporated into PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE. I came to Philadelphia in Fall of 1966, continued school at Drexel Institute and Temple University, completed my film, and dropped out of school by Spring of 1968. The campuses which appear in the film are: Foothill, Stanford, Drexel Institute, University of Pennsylvania, and Purdue University in Indiana. Also appearing in the film are: The Sierras, my California apartment, Pine Hill state park in Indiana, several unnamed public disasters, and the Philadelphia Art Museum.

"Going home -- from west to east; return. Part of a series of turning points. recording a journal in color language; shadows of faces. Realities and memories come out frame by frame. The rhythm of a summer vacation. Rituals of light to dark -- manifesting form. This is a translation of old friends and old places. A ticket home. This film journal resembles the memory charged visual fragments of a cross country trip to the filmmakers home. He calls it a respectful portrait of old friends and old places but tensions filled images combined with the rambling chant and urban ambience of its soundtrack indicates that a more anxious attitude, perhaps toward a fleeting present, underlies this personal document and ticket home." -- Lynn Corcoran, Media Study, Buffalo
"Snippets of sunsoaked home movie footage, jumbled around kinetically, become a wild whorl of color and motion that's like watching the spin cycle in a washing machine. Dominic Angerame, with this film, gives you the distinct impression that someone's handling their childhood memories on a silver platter." -- Frank Young, The Tallahassee Flambeau

I was hoping to strike it rich on our honeymoon in Reno. In a way I did, seeing that the camera was filled with very rich imagery in recording this visual journal of our brief visit. The soundtrack is a creation of Katie Steinorth who translated the Buddhist chant of Om Ma Ni Pad Me Hum into the words oh honey, bring me home.

Living in suburban New Jersey watching too much film noir on television. The materials thrown together are: a partial inventory of houses in my neighborhood; a fragment of a dream journal; a 1949 pamphlet about Englewood Cliffs by The League Women Voters; outtakes from a fiction film I acted in; lines from famous movies; a passage from Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

"Loisada" means "Lower East Side" in New York slang. It's also the name of the neighborhood where the community garden at Avenue C is located. I flimed this garden throughout different seasons at a time when I was a community gardener. Far from being a didactic documentary, my film is a personal experience, plastic, sonorous and poetic. Gardeners told me their day to day life outside the garden, and others, more reserved gave me recipes or told me about their favorite film, etc... LOISADA, AVENUE C is a parable on the mixture of human and urban culture in New York, in an enclosed garden, a living place that "knits" social links between inhabitants in a lower income neighborhood. It's a film about human nature and the quality of life. I made my film between 1998 and 1999 when I lived in New York. The interviews with the gardeners came first; it was my way of getting to know them. While walking from my home to the garden, I recorded the cacophony of ambient musical sounds that became a part of the city's din. Later, I filmed in 16mm, Super 8, and also used a still camera.

QUICK BILLY: A Horse Opera in four reels, conceived for viewing with a single projector, allowing the natural pauses between reels. The experience of transformation between life and death, death and birth, or rebirth in four reels. The'rolls' took the form of a correspondence, or THEATRE, between their author and Stan Brakhage, in the winter of 1968-69. They're kind of magic cousins of the film. A personal record of the author's psychic journey and physical recovery during a period of his life which might be described essentially as one of transformation...'the dark wood encountered in the middle of life's journey' (Dante)... As poetic cinema, its significance to the world is perhaps in its narration of a singular phenomenon of our time, implicitly revealing those ancient 'rules' of transit evolved over the centuries; e. g., the BARDO THODOL (The Tibetan Book of the Dead), as well as Dante Alighieri's own discoveries in the time of the Fourteenth Century Europe, etc. The BARDO THODOL, from which Parts I-III are adopted structurally, admonishes (the deceased)...'a time of uncertainty, undertaking nothing -- fear not the terrifying forms of your own psyche...' Mankind deceased encountering a spectacular stream of images it once viewed as Reality. The film concludes with Part IV, a western one-reeler, which dramatically summarizes the material of Parts I, II, and III, in abstract form. All the film and tape was recorded in Fort Bragg, California, next to the Pacific Ocean. A final subtitle reads 'ever westward eternal rider.' Is it the image of Sisyphus or of Buddha? A beautifully incoherent work of art! A journey towards unity with this recent American film, both macroscopic and universal in its view. -- Hans Helmut Rudele, Filmdichter und Luftpiloten, DIE ZEITUNG, Hamburg, Dec. 12. 1970.

My ROMANCE is intended for something like 'broadcast' form, or like a correspondence... not so much for showing a big batch of it at one sitting. Eventually it should be in both film and video tape form. The Introduction, INTRO.1 & 2 is finished now. I will send rolls from time to time and hope one of these days to put the rest of it in shape for you to see. Meanwhile, I'll be continuing to record the ROMANCE wherever I am. The work seems to be a sort of manual, concerning all the stuff of the cycle of life, from the most detailed mundanery to... God knows.--B. B., June 1 1977

It began with 'ENTHUSIASM'. I first leaned of Gordon ball at the 1979 Atlanta Independent Film Festival when, along with 400 other festival goers, I watched an utterly earnest, painful, and serious film called ENTHUSIASM sandwiched in a program, of likable festival fare. for the 14 long minutes that ENTHUSIASM claimed the screen, a roomful of unprepared viewers was confronted with a filmmakers account of his mothers death following a prolonged illness with Alzheimer's Disease, a form of premature senility. Ball's detailed narrative, recited in a voice struggling to maintain composure, accompanied the generally random series of snapshots and posed photographs of his mother, interspersed with passages of colored leader and flares which constituted the visual body of the film. Later, at the close of the festival, after five nights of immersion in film and video, ENTHUSIASM was still with me... going over these images is a universal experience. They are pictures that record the fairest moments as reflected in the face one wears in the front of a camera. They preserve the memory of a time which existed before we children came. In them the subject, even with age, is always alive. Ball's story, replete with the mundane, un-talked of details of illness, forms the dark aspect of those fair, eternal moments-the face we instinctively turn away from the camera's eye. ENTHUSIASM'S drama, takes the shape of the tension between picture and word, between the memory we cherish and the one we would often rather deny or forget. -- Linda Dubler, Art Papers ENTHUSIASM presents unique family image in brown, black, and white, and color photos collecting an older generations poignant enthusiasm romances marriages socials graces and native myths. Narrated in flashbacks from his parents graves intermixed with chronological soundtrack account of their buried histories, awkward hones and raw-voiced, hesitant and sincere, whereby Gordon Ball makes you cry for life itself. -- Allen Ginsberg

Last three months of Kathleen's pregnancy; first week of Daisy's life.
'the soul that rises with us, our life's star/ hath had elsewhere its setting/ and cometh from afar/ not in entire forgetfulness/ and not in utter nakedness/ but trailing clouds of glory do we come/ from God who is our home.' Wordsworth, Ode: Imitations of Immortality from 'recollections of early childhood' Viewers of some of my last four films have offered suggestions for programming-projecting FATHER MOVIE and ENTHUSIASM as companion films, for instance. Lately, I've been seeing the most recent three as a trilogy offering metaphor of existence -- CLOUDS OF GLORY (birth), MEXICAN JAIL FOOTAGE (prison life-bodily existence), and ENTHUSIASM (death). And, as it happens, current work in progress (Oct. '82) TH'FIRMAMENT, is set in the heavens-not in celebration of wished-for afterlife but of divine emptiness.

THE FAMILY ALBUM is a one-hour experimental documentary film utilizing a vast collection of rare 16mm home movies from the 1920's through the 1950's. These home movies are exciting, authentic documents of American folk history and culture, taken from the personal vantage point of the amateur photographic eye. Subjects span the entire spectrum of the traditional home movie idiom, including mixed racial, ethnic, economic, and geographic sources. The soundtrack for THE FAMILY ALBUM is composed of many oral history interviews, and a wide and electric variety of family audio recordings including birthday parties, weddings anniversaries, funerals, audio letters, music lessons... arguments in the kitchen. Structured from birth to death, THE FAMILY ALBUM is a collage film that weaves its elements into a composite lifetime, passing through the celebration and struggles from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience. It is a universal yet intimate portrait of American family life, not scripted, not rehearsed, not immune to conflicts and contradictions underlying family life and its rituals. ... exerts a cumulative a considerable behavioral fascination. -- J. Hoberman, Village Voice
... a moving and universal celebration, a family album that provokes a warm shock of recognition. --Howard Aaron, Northwest Film and Video Center
... the disjunction between soundtrack and image curiously heightens the reality and surreality of the home movie as a private dream. -- John Hanhardt, Whitney Museum of American Art.
... Most of not all of the adults in the films are surely dead by now, forgotten, often almost unknown, yet visible in a flickering facsimile of life, waving and speaking to us from beyond this life in a kind of anonymous immortality -- Ted Mahar, Oregonian, July 4, 1987

Alan Berliner takes on his reclusive father as the reluctant subject of this poignant and graceful study of family history and memory. What emerges is a uniquely cinematic biography that finds both humor and pathos in the swirl of conflicts and affections that bind father and son. Ultimately this complex portrait is a meeting of the minds - where the past meets the present, where generations collide, and where the boundaries of family life are pushed, pulled, stretched, torn and surprisingly at times, also healed. Particularly in this age of low format video proliferation, Nobody's Business is notable for its masterful editing, stunning craft and exquisite filmmaking. Filmmaker Alan Berliner achieves a rare feat of inter-generational sleuthing as he weaves together aesthetically and emotionally rich interviews with his father and other family members, an extraordinary array of archival material, and live action sequences to create an inventive and touching essay on memory and family. Mining the hitherto untapped resources of long-distance relatives, some of whom were unknown to him prior to the making of the film, Berliner touches upon universal themes relating to families, regardless of cultural background. -- Rockefeller Foundation Catalogue "Alan Berliner illustrates the power of fine art to transform life." -- THE NEW YORK TIMES "A funny, poignant, and densely textured look at family and personality... a film of unusual charms and stylistic verve -- affecting and revealing." -- VARIETY "A storyteller of profound scope and an editor of eye-popping skill, Berliner ultimately coaxes a hugely entertaining story out of his relatives -- an Albert Brooks comedy with the gravity of personal history. " -- CITY PAGES
The News and Arts Weekly of the Twin Cities A gift to the whole human family -- hilarious, tender, provocative, witty, touching, instructive and, as with all works of art, exhilarating." -- NEW YORK JEWISH WEEK
"I know of no one working in personal films today who can do so well what Alan Berliner does: bring dramatically alive the intense agon and ambivalence and love within families. His dazzling technical mastery of the relation between sound and image is always kept in the service of deep psychological truths." -- Philip Lopate. FILM COMMENT
"What leapfrogs Berliner's work to the head of the pack is a combination of passionate involvement, cool/detached intellect, thematic consistency that mirrors the universal in the personal... and a virtual inability to bore the viewer. A Berliner hour is like a New York minute -- a lot happens in a short amount of time, and it's over before you know it." -- Morrie Warshawski, CHICAGO JEWISH STAR

I am not sure that what I wrote is true. I am certain it is truthful. -- Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz Survivor, from her book Auschwitz and After In this personal documentary, a filmmaker sets off on an odyssey through Eastern Europe, Israel, South America, and The United States to uncover long-harbored family mysteries, myths, and secrets. In the end, she draws strength from the connections between her own life and the lives of her parents' -- a legacy she will share with her child.

"DOG STAR MAN is the most self-sufficient and innocent film, self sufficient in the sense that Chaplin is. No music is needed to watch Chaplin... because his dance is all the music that we need. DOG STAR MAN is silent in the sense that the greatest silent film are. In DOG STAR MAN the film itself becomes a dance of editing and moves as the best silent actors do with their physical movement with arm, leg, tongue and face... The film breathes and is an organic and surging thing... it is a colossal lyrical adventure- dance of the image in every variation of color." -- Michael McClure, Art Forum. BRAND NEW PRINT.

In the tradition of Ezra Pound's vorticism, PART I is a Noh drama, the exploration in minute detail of a single action and all its ramifications. The formal construction of the film the interrelationships and significance of the images, has been woven on an extremely subtle level. Each shot appears only as an isolated piece,,, appreciated (as) it is understood within the context of the entire mosaic. -- P Adams Sitney BRAND NEW PRINT.

Two portraits in relation to each other, the first of Robert Creeley, the second of Micheal McClure. (These companion films were reduced to 8mm. for necessary inclusion in XV SONG TRAITS-- see SONGs above-- but may be also be rented in their original form as here indicated.)

A visualization of the inner world of foetal beginnings, the infant, the baby, the child--a shattering of the myths of childhood through revelation of the extremes of violent terror and overwhelming joy of that world darkened to most adults by their sentimental remembering of it... A tone poem for the eye-- very inspired by the music of Oliver Messiaen.

Animator Sarah Jane Lapp's Sweetface 2000-2013) is a "personal essay film which uses sugar production as a point of departure to explore a variety of relational moments that involve power, gratitude, and love. The film evolved from the filmmaker's hand-production of about 1,000 sugar packets, the majority of which she gave as gifts to workers at the Domino Sugar Refinery during their twenty-month strike in the early 2000s." (SF Cinematheque)

Sarah Jane Lapp's personal essay film Sweetface probes the shadows of sugar and labor, love and power. Oscillating between interviews with striking Domino Sugar workers, her father, and her sweethearts, Lapp documents her own process of making and disseminating a thousand sugar packets, most of which she gave as gifts to workers at the Domino Sugar Refinery during their twenty-month strike in the early 2000's. (NW Film Forum)

In 11 thru 12 , Callard usese the structure of the I Ching and an ironing board as a broadcasting desk to consider how to search, what it will cost, the absurdity of explanation, and the limits of the measuring mind.

Between City Hall Park and the Hudson River, I photographed lights and reflections visible from places where other people worked. There were flowers that were nearly fluorescent for sale at the Farm & Garden Nursery and to see at the Botanic Gardens. Earlier in life, both singing onstage and diving boards were platforms for performance.

In Lost Shoe Blues, the camera walks looking over weeds growing in landfill sand dumped to extend the edges of Battery Park City. We hears a song about losing shoes and losing time as nature forces persist. At this time in New York City, there actually were lost landscapes strewn with single cast off shoes, weeds, and other bits of life.

Talking Landscape: Early Media 1974-1984 is a compendium of short media works made between 1974 and 1984. Available on DVD or as a mix of film and video, flexible.

The following four parts are preserved as 16mm film. Otherwise, the material is available as video.

16mm Films: In 2010, 11 thru 12 and Fluorescent/Azalea , both super 8mm films, were preserved as 16mm with funds from the national Film Preservation Foundation by Bill Brand in cooperation with Brent Phillips and The Fales Library & Special Collections. 11 thru 12 was warmly received at the 7th Orphans Film Symposium and the 56th Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Lost Shoe Blues and Flora Funera (for Battery Park City) were preserved on film the following year by Brittan Dunham and Bill Brand's class in the Moving Picture Archiving Program at New York University. Livia Bloom selected the feature length compendium for theatrical release at the Maysles Cinema in New York in 2012. As Guest Curator for DOXA 2013, she wrote an essay also titled Talking Landscape: Early Media Works 1974-1984 , (http://2013.doxafestival.ca/festival/essays/talking). Gradually, more pieces of this period are becoming visible again. In 2014, New York Women in Film and Television awarded funds to preserve Some Food May Be Found in the Desert.

Included in the DVD: Fragments of a Self Portrait
Window
Balls with Club
Rubber Shoes
Drawers
Sweep
Delaware Stone Throw
Fluorescent/Azaela
Lost Shoe Blues
Flora Funera (for Battery Park City)
11 thru 12
Contact Mics with Cara
Lispenard Ladder
The Customs House
Notes on Ailanthus
Commuting from Point to Point
The Times Square Show 1980
Pus Factory

I made this film in the course of a single day using a borrowed sync. set-up. Color and sequence of event has been preserved. My concerns in the film were to photograph and record events that were anticipated, but accidental, within the confines of a format that would provide a context of determined artificiality.

The film documents a student's reaction to a poetry reading session. After enjoying the strange environment, and companionship, the student looks at himself and his activities in a different way. The film was photographed at the Rutgers Campus in New Jersey.

De Profundis is a three part, hand/alternative-processed experimental film based on Oscar Wilde's prison letter De Profundis. Incorporating home movies from the 1920's and early gay male erotica along with images from Radical Faerie gatherings, queer pagan rituals, drag performances and images of confinement, this 65 minute film sets up a haunting investigation of queerness, masculinity, history and sexuality. These images are buttressed against a soundtrack composed of Wilde's aphorisms, a voice and piano setting of Wilde's prison letter, and multi-tracked interviews with a diverse group of contemporary gay men. "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." - Oscar Wilde If film no longer existed, De Profundis gives the impression that Lawrence Brose is certainly capable of reinventing it. Oddly enough, Brose would do so by stripping film down to visual components that are reassembled only as they are knitted to each other at their breaking points. Redacted. But one must resist the impulse to talk only of how Brose - with controlled image manipulation and extremely experimental hand-processing techniques - has produced in De Profundis a film united by stress and diaphanous. De Profundis is more than an unconventional approach to filmmaking, though it would be a visual tour-de-force if it were only that. Taking its cue from Oscar Wilde, De Profundis holds up a mirror to gay sexuality and plumbs the tensions reflected there. Meshing images culled from home movies, drag performances, Radical Faerie gatherings, and vintage gay erotica with a piano soundtrack scored from Wilde's prison letter and a voice composition fashioned from the poet's aphorisms, Brose makes film itself into the protagonist of his exploration. With images and sounds constantly decaying and shifting and contaminating each other, film becomes a metaphor of the transforming self that Wilde prized for corrupting a sense of sexual normalcy. De Profundis embraces Wildesque deviance and cautions that the desire for normalization prevalent among contemporary gays threatens to contain it. Serenity in sophistication is a triumph - like the deviance of De Profundis, which, achieved in an age too terrified to be deviant, lies in the film's unflinching honesty and terrifying beauty. - John Palattella Music by Frederic Rzewski with additional sound compositions by Douglas Cohen.

Four poetic variations on the search for love; four odd characters living out their daydreams: Game Little Gladys, The Gardener's Son, Princess Printemps, and The Aging Balletomane. Based on Broughton's own poems, this film blends image, music and verse in moods from the farcical to the elegiac.
"Lovely and delicious, true cinematic poetry." -- Dylan Thomas
"The best film poetry ever made." -- Willard Maas

Photography, Stan Brakhage; Music, Lou Harrison. This film celebrates weddings and being wed, and the union of opposites in everything everywhere. It is my alchemical testament to the mystery of Yang and Yin. "With a strong feeling for the tension between wish and reality, NUPTIAE is a semi-home movie, beautifully casually photographed, about a mature couple who celebrate their wedding with a civil ceremony, a religious banquet, and a private beach ritual. Broughton's lucidity, even more than his lyricism, seems as much a function of what he sees as how he sees. Like all the best filmmakers, a love for reality makes him responsible, and he is tied to his world by bonds of gratitude." -- Roger Greenspun, The New York Times "One of Broughton's finest films." -- P. Adams Sitney Awards: First Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1969; First Prize, Yale Film Festival, 1969.

"DREAMWOOD is James Broughton's major work to date. It is a modern day spiritual odyssey in which a man is mysteriously compelled to leave his home and embark on a voyage to a strange and magical island. On the island he faces the most improbable and intense experiences of his life, ranging from total humiliation to a deep sense of oneness with the forces of life. Heroic in concept, subtle in execution, DREAMWOOD is a beautiful film by a true master of the medium." -- David Bienstock
"DREAMWOOD is Broughton's finest film." -- Jerome Hill
"No single film in the whole of the American avant-garde comes as close as this one to the source of the trance film, Cocteau's Blood of a Poet." -- P. Adams Sitney

DEVOTIONS is the vision of a world where men have forsaken rivalry and taken up affection, thereby creating a society that relishes a variety of comradely devotions. The film takes delight in observing the friendly things men can do together, from the odd to the rapturous, from the playful to the passionate. These events appear in a series of cameo duets performed by men of all ages and appetites. The tapestry of changing scenes is strung on a narrative thread: the personal romance of the two makers of the film, as they discover their own affections and interweave them with those of their friends. In the end they assert their hope that loving comradeship may yet be the happy norm for the world. The film was made over a nine month period on locations from Seattle to San Diego, and included the participation of some forty-five couples.

"The movie opens with a banana still-life vignette seen ripening through time-lapse photography for several days on a rooftop. The energy-charged New York Marathon follows, suggesting the rush of locations and pace about to unfold. The sense of traveling is persistent, we are taken from the marathon in New York, to breakfast in Maine, back to busy city streets, to the Grand Canyon, sky, the dancer Dana Reitz working out in the woods, poets posing, and the journey goes on. There is hardly a breather. Lines of David Shapiro's poem 'When a Man loves a Woman' are printed occasionally across the screen In one segment we hear Alice Notley read her poem 'A Woman comes into the Room.' Essentially a collage of images and sound, the precise order of events is unimportant. Overlays of time, season and location become fulfilling and cumulative experience, the particular sequences like cuts on a diamond." -- Joe Giordano

This is a solemn approach to the mundane ritual of the ever-awaited coffee break. It is also a self-portrait among fellow (women) office workers.
"COFFEE BREAK... is a single shot movie, though shown through several rolls of film... It is an arrogant statement to declare this shot not only interesting, but self-sufficient, as these six women, including Camhi, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, read and exchange the paper, a picture album and a book. It takes a perversity to enjoy it... I decided to stay with it and find pleasure in a catalogue of gesture and incident and a comfort in its seemingly static ambitions." -- Anthony Bannon, BUFFALO EVENING NEWS

"... is just what its title and program note say it is: 'A look at physical therapy, having profited from it. '... Russian formalism associates art with 'making strange'. Gail Camhi seems to be doing just the reverse--showing how ordinary, say, amputees and their stumps and artificial limbs are, making them familiar and banal presences rather than fearfully charged objects. Yet by removing (to some extent) myth and other forms of fantasy from a hospital ward, she may actually be inviting the esthetic imagination to relocate itself elsewhere in the film..." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Declarations of Independents," VILLAGE VOICE
"BELLEVUE FILM... was made in a rehabilitation ward, and it offers and inventory of patients: a child learning to use crutches, a young man beginning exercise with weights, the old man, the beautiful woman, the middle aged man without legs and one arm. The film settles upon this man, finally, discovering as one might, as a visitor, a pain in a face, the limp pajama over a stump of a leg, the cinches, straps, buckles of prostheses, his happiness and pride, one marvels. Camhi's film manner is without cuteness. Images seemingly are made from whatever vantage point is possible, not from a preconceived angle. Flash frames, light-struck ends are kept if the image beneath is worthy. For it is the image and its information not the style that matters, without sentiment, silently." -- Anthony Bannon, BUFFALO EVENING NEWS

This is a short film description of a room, and the way light (coming through a window) illuminates papers on a desk. An attempt to use color, camera movement and editing to transform everyday surroundings into a poetic rendering of human emotions. The attempt of the film, I believe, is first to describe a feeling of restfulness and silence that come from being alone; second to hint at a kind of pain, lying beneath the surface of aloneness, that comes out of a sense of a violent -- though not fully visible -- past.

A personal and impressionistic journey through and experience of growing. A study in mood and rich in color, the film explores a young woman's infatuation with adolescent boys -- to reveal her yearning to be full. It touches on the painful part of her won initiation into selfhood.

Multiple overlapping images combine with still-frames, in digital mode, of a Puerto Rican filmmaker's telephone conversation with the repairman. Written by Lee Breuer and performed by Ruth Maleczeck, both of Mabou Mines. Music by Bob Telson.

This video essay combines diary footage of St. Petersburg with archival material, accompanied by the voices of two young Russians who, through personal anecdote, describe the emotional, political, and economic transformations that have wrenched their society.

Phases of The Moon: "I usually avoid the term "film poem", because it was overused in the '40's and '50's. But somehow it fits "Phases of The Moon", it is a film poem and nothing else. A small, miniature film poem, a jewel, if the word masterpiece is too stuffy. "-- Jonas Mekas, Village Voice, October, 1973
"Phases of The Moon" is a film of many powerful and striking moments, but it seems organized according to a system that remains--on my two viewings, anyway -- obscure, as if one has been transported to some other planet, with different languages and is which the moon's phases followed rules incomprehensible to us". -- Fred Camper, The Chicagoan, March, 1978

"Made while living in Brugghe with Ioanna Salajan and Richard Lamm." T.C.
"...the film shot off TV, reminds me a little of (Fernand) Leger and (Walter) Ruttmann." -Scott MacDonald, Afterimage 1981.
Printed by hand using sunlight. Developed by the filmmaker.

"A Berlin diary." T.C.
"... was a returning to material forms. It's just a diary, but once again it involves saving snapshots in the face of death and change. It's not clear who is saving the snapshots. Peter was taking them as much as I was. In fact, the film is progresively more Peter's; the last part of it was all filmed by him. Even shots I took were sometimes his idea. Berlin, a city that's divided, seemed like a metaphor for the way people divide each other and don't recognize parts of themselves all around them." T.C. interview, Afterimage, Summer 1981

Cass is walking on a block of Manhattan, when he suddenly meets the people who are involved with his life: his girlfriend, his mother, his friends, his uncle, something is happening but he will realize it when he crosses the street... at the beginning.

ODILONODILON is a portrait of an adolescent boy coming to know himself and his place within his family and society. It uses historic sound: Edward R. Murrow's Christmas Eve broadcast during World War II to the parents of the young children of London's families, urging them to send their youngest to the country to save their lives as a protection against the nightly bombing raids. The "Yanks in December" recording is ironically echoed in the baseball motif in the film. Odilon's love of baseball, eating and cooking and his growing awareness of adulthood's responsibility, ambition and judgement create a brooding tension. Playfulness and intellectual rigor struggle to remain part and parcel of his daily life against the larger backdrops of Alcatraz and World War II.

"A film counterpointing the hard reality of the present with the fantastic actuality or imagining of the idyllic past. This is best realized in the halting transition from the journey through time back to the watery one that evoked." --Ken Kelman

A personal melancholia concerning the death of my mother with my own personal memor images of school, home, lost first love and fears of my own obliteration. Made on a grant from the Canada Council. --B. C.

A day at the Fulton Street Fish Market in New York City. The noise and unceasing movement of trucks, hand carts, and workers. Filleting, weighing, crating, and the icing the fish in the wholesale fish houses. The winding down of the hectic pace of the market as it eventually dies. Only piles of rubbish, wooden crates, and a few seagulls punctuate the silence. --R. C.

Sunday afternoon in Washington Square Park, New York City. New York's ethnic hodge podge represented by winos, students, hippies, street musicians, checker players, and uptowners--all interlaced with tourists and children. The soundtrack consists primarily of music recorded in the park. --R. C.

Portrays the loneliness and alienation subway riders experience in the dirt and graffitti laden New York City subway. Screeching cars, pulsing escalators and moving platforms, nervous and stressed riders as they wait interminably or as they surge forward to compete for a seat during rush hour. The underground claustrophobia is finally relieved as the trains emerge above the ground and rattle to the end of the line. --R. C.

Catherine's dream, full of anxieties about sexual pursuit and their resolution in her liberation, comes to dominate her waking hours. Elements of the dream keep intruding on her day, through coffee and love. The dream replaces her fragmented experiences with a more lyrical mood that persists for the rest of the film--G. P. C.

The shower is filmed by two miniature cameras in the cabin. A few minutes later the shower film can be seen on the associated "showerbox.net" site on the Internet and can be downloaded on to your own computer.

Simultaneously exposs the viewer to two separate Sundays in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Barry. One, visually; the other, audibly. The one you see is reality. The one you hear is Mr. Barry's romantic recollection of the previous Sunday he spent with Mrs. Barry. --G. D.

Jesus Christ finds himself resurrected in the Catskills. After walking on water and miraculously healing a blind woman, he instinctly heads south down Route 17 towards civilization, carrying a ten-foot cross on his back. How do eight million New Yorkers react to Him. Jesus goes to Time Square to find out. He's preaching to the multitudes when the police show up. Men of the cloth just turn away. See how Jesus finally copes with reality. Actual documentary footage (nothing staged)."--D. D./B. B.
Available on 16mm or standard 8mm.

Three women telling their own stories in a non-narrative, non-documentary form. How do inner conflicts of intimacy, sexual need, and violent impulses emerge in personal relationships? The evidence includes testimonies describing experiences of sexuality, love relationships, births, illegal abortions, adolescence as a Jew in revolutionary Russia and in the Protestant US Midwest. Private anecdotes illuminate societal realities of race, culture and gender. My "story" contributed contradictory images: the archaic Florida swamp, the elegant forms of European medieval architecture, Congress and Anita Hill, the mermaids of Weekie Wachee, victim heroines of European opera, abstract color and light explorations. Bits of 1950s educational films testify to scientific belief in cause and effect and stupefying patriarchal convictions of "how to" grow up well, avoid "going bad" and get a date for the prom.

Hudson River Diary: Book 1 "Chronicles the journey of a train named Cayuga as it travels from New York to Poughkeepsie. There is something profoundly sentimental as you make the trip. You may never have been to this part of the world but you are concerned and you care about it after you see the film." -- Bob Lermann, Today's Filmmaker

A large flower, the silhouette of a figure briskly walking away, a house key, a bread knife, a telephone receiver resting off the hook, and a spinning phonographic turntable define the shifting functional elements in Meshes of the Afternoon from which the film's evolving, malleable construct - the fragile and tenuously interconnected mesh of actual and perceived reality - is intriguingly (and ingenuously) mapped. A woman (Maya Deren) walking along the sidewalk near her home catches a momentary glimpse of a figure turning the corner, unlatches the front door and, after a cursory inspection of the empty household, proceeds upstairs to rest on an armchair situated by a front-view window. From this deceptively simple introductory premise, Maya Deren modulates the mise-en-scene of seemingly mundane objects to create overlapping, yet non-intersecting planes of existential reality, using permutations of recurring images - mirrored surfaces (the apparition's face, polished metal spheres, a hand mirror), glass, duality and doppelgangers - to represent variably interlocking narrative fragments of observation, inference, deduction, and memory. Unfolding with the narrative discontinuity characteristic of nouvelle roman literature (creating an idiosyncratically dissociative filmic language that also characterizes Alain Resnais' subsequent feature films, particularly Last Year at Marienbad and Je t'aime, je t'aime), the film posits a series of subtle structural, temporal, and logical mutations, creating a sublimely recursive, mind-bending meditation on the interaction between experience and memory, domestic banality and violence, imagination and causation.

PROOF is a film so personal that it approaches therapy, but there are certain Devensky preoccupations which become readily apparent to everyone familiar with his work. Perhaps the finest sequence is the investigation of fifty-year-old tombstones in a Jewish cemetary - a scene which bears close resemblance to Devensky's scrutinizing of photographs in other films. Indeed, many of the graves bear photographs of their inhibitants and Devesky imbues the scene with that same romantic nostalgia... PROOF closes with a 2001-style light show and a direct statement of Devensky's evolutionary theory"

"... consists of chickens being butchered and hung out on meat hooks, to the accompaniment of the Fifth Symphony. As the film progresses, the imagery mutates from nearly documentary to nearly surreal. An eyeball-clashing scene recalls "Chien Andalou" yet Devensky holds it on-screen much longer than Dali and Bunuel. Finally a chickens' skull is pounded to bits by a hammer. And each time we think (or wish) the final blow has fallen another follows. The camera peeks all the while and one is uncertain of what is more disquiting - the action on the film, or ridged stare of the camera. --Richard Koszarski, New York American

The apotheosis of Devensky's work is CATERPILLARS AND ANTS which technically resembles a Lumiere film. The camera starts at a man eating caterpillars for the entire running time. The spectacle is so repulsive that the hand-held camera begins to shake wildly, Devensky himself admits that he had to look away during part of the filming. Thus the camera did the looking for him and for us. The experience is quintessentially voyeuristic, as even the filmmaker did not experience first hand what was going on." --Richard Koszarski, New York American

Consisting basically of home movie footage of family, relatives, and myself during the mid-1940's I have included loops of certain sequences and actions that have attracted me. Invariably people find HOMECALL a very warm film; however, upon closer scrutiny quite another facet is visible. --D. D.

Vivienne Dick's first film after the New York series takes her back to her native Ireland. Using Super-8 film as a parody of the 'travelogue' or home-movie style film, Dick takes a expatriate, tourist look at her homeland. The narrative follows Margaret Ann Irinsky as the American tourist trekking from a Dublin populated by Hare Krishnas and rock music, to the horse-drawn carriages in the west of Ireland and the kissing of the Blarney stone. The quaint perception of Ireland and the Americanization of the native culture are contrasted with interviews from sectarian prisoners and footage of political marches. As in all her work, Dick uses a mixture of verite shots which capture the essence of the locality and intersperses them with images which have a totally different feel. This method is used to highlight issues in a subtle way wherein the camera takes an active rather than a voyeuristic role.
VIVIENNE DICK

"A personal version of 'the family system' from the inside" -- Rod Stoneman, British Film and Video Directory
This film marks a return for Vivienne to the to the Donegal landscape of family origin and contrasts it with life in the 'big city' in this gentle, almost ethnographic film that merges home movies and social documentary aesthetics.

For Jim Healy.
NIMBUS "...was Robert Creeley's first choice to show in conjunction with a lecture at Rocky Mountain Film Center in 1978. This film owes much to Creeley's poetry and Edward Hopper's paintings, although no conscious consideration structured the working process - Hopper in the sense that Brian O'Doherty writes of the paintings as displaying "an observed, an observer and a witness." --G.D.

"In The dream and the waking, tongue, speech, have disappeared almost entirely. Instead, language scrolls across the screen as we travel by bus through a grim and crumbling cityscape. Language reveals itself as material, image. The film takes place from behind the eyes of the filmmaker, enduring a weekly round-trip from New York to her job in Boston, and exhausting and demoralizing routing. But editing opens a line of escape, induces proprioceptive states that counter the landscape's narcoleptic effect. Filters and stop-motion, layering, sweep us away. The freeway, conveyor belt to hell, populated by zombies, metamorphoses into a lush poetics of shifting geometries. The landscape tilts, skids away in slow-motion-a carnival ride where the distancing of interpretive thought is subsumed in a molasses careen of sensation-a strange suturing occurs between mind and body, viewer and viewed. The video ends, the pleasurable estrangement lingers." -- Leah Gilliam and Elisabeth Subrin Sale: $75 individual, $100 institutional

CUSTOM MACHINE -- A Collage film made in an afternoon - an insight into where we are - or where I was that afternoon. Planes fly. The Beach Boys play. BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL--Our flag--our team--ourplanes--our ships--Us! Us! Us!--J. D.

An expression of internal anguish. The confrontation of a man and his torment. Juxtaposed against his external composure are images of a woman and lights in distortion, with tension heightened by the sounds of power saws and a heartbeat.

A man wonders, measures, views relationships, people, places, things, time, himself. A sensual journey through a series of subjective reflections.
"[A] beautifully photographed color montage of shots; insect, animal, man and galaxy; a sobering antidote to the orgy of subjectivism going on elsewhere." -- Vincent Canby, The New York Times
"The artist's search for the meaning of his own existence is never-ending and takes many forms. Ed Emshwiller's remarkable epic, RELATIVITY, continues this exploration with extraordinary frankness and rare technical skill. The sequence which symbolically portrays a woman at the moment of sexual climax is one of the most beautiful in the literature of film." -- Willard Van Dyke
"RELATIVITY is a marvelously sensual film ... it is, I have no doubt, a masterpiece." -- Richard Whitehall, LA Free Press

In a presentation of myself, and a questioning of my origins and place. The film is about being alone with an audience; about loneliness and self-consciousness. There are film-self-reflexive references to Maya Deren's AT LAND and MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON, which point to this self-consciousness as a filmmaker. The theme of the film was, in part, provoked by a studying of Rimbaud's poem 'Bad Blood.' The poem is about heredity. It is an enraged proclaiming against his class origins. The title of the group of poems in which 'Bad Blood' is included is 'A Season in Hell.' The title of this film, I'M IN HEAVEN, is evidence of my ironic interpretation of the ideas raised in the poem. My film is more concerned with my biological origins and my possible future offspring then in placing myself in terms of class origins. --M. F.

I made this film from some of my own footage and from optically printed sections of educational films from the 1950s. The film is about personal and political isolation, trying to stay "safe at home," but being entrapped there.

Choreagraphed play of real and reflected images, mostly of the filmmaker. Also involving window frames, a pane of glass, light projected by the rising sun, and the sporadic pulse of a leaky kitchen faucet. My studio, Cambridge, Mass. --M. F.

Surrealist poet and artist Charles Henri Fords 1971 film, Johnny Minotaur is a lyrical explosion of taboos: incest, intergenerational desire, pansexuality and autoeroticism are a few of the issues he grapples with through mythopoeic, sensual imagery, recitations of his diaries and a philosophical debate featuring an impressive narration by such artists as Salvador Dali, Allen Ginsberg, Warren Sonbert and Lynne Tillman. Unseen for over two decades, The New American Cinema Group, Inc./The Film-Makers Cooperative has restored Johnny Minotaur and resuscitated this classic of forgotten, queer cinema that belongs alongside the films of Kenneth Anger, Derek Jarman and Jean Genet.

(Traveling Matte) is the pivot upon which the whole of Hapax Legomena turns. Thanks to the Binghamton Video Workshop, and the experimental video lab, Antioch College.
"This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death -- the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker's hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future." -- Stan Brakage.

A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)... visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood. The soundtrack annexes, as mantram, the Wade-Giles syllabary of the Chinese language.

"In GLORIA! Frampton juxtaposes nineteenth-century concerns with contemporary forms through the interfacing of a work of early cinema with a videographic display of textual material. These two formal components (the film and the texts) in turn relate to a nineteenth-century figure, Frampton's maternal grandmother, and to a twentieth-century one, her grandson (filmmaker Frampton himself). In attempting to recapture their relationship, GLORIA! becomes a somewhat comic, often touching meditation on death, on memory and on the power of image, music and text to resurrect the past."--Bruce Jenkins

"Freude's diary. It is very personal and light in form. We see a birth; scenes at home; on beaches; with friends; and a one; and clips from TV and films. It flows easily and it all has a very special warmth about it." --Jonas Mekas, Village Voice

An early morning meeting with Peter Kubelka. The sobering light casts rigid structure to this Viennese waltz-cherub. Peter graces the occasion with a song and a detailed look at every aspect of his form. The experience was curtailed in anticipation of a more liquid situation.- S.G.

FROM THE NAKED EYE CINEMA - Super 8 original blowup 16mm on VHS
A Super-8 homestyle movie which explores the radical advances made by PWA's (People With AIDS), in developing their own health care. Focussing precisely on the ordinary minutiae of David Conover and Joe Walsh's daily life, DHPG Mon Amour shows the struggle for self-determination and control over one's own body, and resonates on an intimate and more broadly political level. DHPG Mon Amour was featured at the 1990 New Directors Series at the Museum Of Modern Art and has been exhibited at museums and theaters throughout the US and Europe.

Made from material I collected through the years when I went back to visit my parents at l'Ile d'Orleans, Quebec. It includes both home movie and other types of footage which peculiarly inform on each other. In this film the camera I, in extension with home movie reality, is a living, participating entity. The film represents an endearing but removed artifact, a strange contradiction between loneliness and frozenness. -- V. G., notes from Collective for Living Cinema, Nov. 1984

A video portrait of my friend, Susan Weisser and of her rapport with 13 year old son Billy and seventeen year old daughter Amanda. The video, divided in two sections used as a premise the reconstruction of her daily rituals with first the son and then the daughter. Enactments, accounts, confidences and spirited arguments freely crisscross each other within the dynamic that my presence and that of the camera create. Great opportunities ensued for live tensions in the framing of sounds and visuals; a sort of enchanted construction from the fanciful revelations of the everyday. Award: Second prize, 1996 Black Maria Film & Video Festival Screening: Symposium on Independent Film & Video at the University of Colorado, Boulder, June 1996. WNET REEL NEW YORK, Summer 1998. Purchased by: Collection of New York University

In this highly personal and intimate travel diary, Birgit Hein has filmed with great candor her problems with aging, her need for tenderness, the frustration of beeing alone and her experience in Jamaica.

Have you ever wanted to look through old albums and diaries to see how people were years ago? Old films, snapshots, and animation with diaries as commentary, show three generations of a family (1915-1965) and the world around them from Wold Wars to World's Fairs, Vietnam and the assassination of JFK. --A. H.

In Hermann Hesse's study hung a colorful tapestry composed of birds, beasts, trees and flowers. The flora and fauna represented a universe of harmony, the celebration of life, woven by delighted hands. Its praise and influence upon his work are evoked in the words from Hesse's own journal. 'On the wall of my studio hangs a tapestry...' So begin the words of Hermann Hesse in writing about his favorite tapestry. Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch, his daughter-in-law, has filmed the tapestry and used his words to describe its beautiful folkloric and dream-like forms. The viewer thus enters the philosophical world of Hermann Hesse. --I. H. R.

JULIE FROM OHIO is a reconstructed journey recorded in dreams and impressions in Julie's notebook. Julie lives in New York and works as a call-girl, waitress, yoga teacher, and model. In an effort to gain objectivitym she leaves New York to visit relatives in the Abruzzi region of Italy. Her sense of time becomes blurred as she visits cemeteries and museums and looks at old family photos. She finds her strongest sense of certainty in the symbols of the Tarot, whose constancy among the anachronisms around her remains unchanged. As she recalls her life in New York, she gradually begins to understand her shifting sense of values and, shortly before she leaves Italy, she finds and abandoned tower in whose scribbled-on walls she seems to recognize symbols of her past and of what her future might become. --I. H. R.

"Jerome Hill's film FILM PORTRAIT is one of the key works in the comparatively new genre of the diary film, the autobiographical film. It's a genre of film where the author works basically with the footage that comes from close around his life. By means of this footage, he leads us into the period of the class from which he comes, or into his own ideas. In this particular case, among many other things, through the FILM PORTRAIT, Jerome Hill leads us into a social background that is not only very uniquely American but which also is about the least documented in cinema-at least not as genuinely as Jerome Hill does it in his film: the life, the feeling, and the style of the well-to-do American class at the beginning of the century. Specifically, the film deals with the family of James J. Hill, the family that built the railroads of America, and the development of Jerome Hill himself as a Young Man and an Artist. Since the period dealt with in this film coincides with the development of Cinema as a Young Art, and the development of the Avantgarde Film as a form of cinema, FILM PORTRAIT becomes also a film about the art of cinema and a film about the Avantgarde Film... It's about the liberation of an artist from the bonds of his family, his class, the fashionable art styles, and one thousand other bonds: a liberation through cinema..." --Jonas Mekas

The first of Solrun Hoaas' films from Hatoma Island, Okinawa, Japan. A documentary on daily life on small depopulated island using a combination of diary narration and English subtitles. The film uses an ebb-and-flow structure to capture the recurring events and images of life on an island that once had over 600 people, but now only little over 40 due to the move to the cities "for the sake of the children's education."

A poetic exploration of the film-maker's coming to a poetic exploration of the film-maker's coming to terms with painful childhood memories. This film leads the viewer on an emotional journey in which cinematic metaphors and manipulated images evoke forgotten feelings.

Hampton came from North to Philadelphia as a young man of 19. He worked and became an accomplished plumber. He raised a family. His children have grown up and his wife has died. He lives on Gideon Street in the sKid-row section of Philadelphia. The world is changing in this area in its own relentless, mindless way. The neighborhood had never been 'up', but in the last 20 years, it has gone from better to worse. It now makes way for a highway exit ramp. Hampton, for his part, is a straight and honest man. He harbors no bitterness for the way things have gone. He is a man of dignity, not of pride--he talks more about the world than about himself. He is graceful in a graceless world. --P. J./A. D.

THE VESTAL THEATRE is a documentary shot in the lobby of a movie theater from behind the candy counter. The camera was turned off only when it ran out of film. It was shot sync-sound fixed camera. The movie goers could see the camera clearly (no Allen-Funt cute). Like Monet's cathedral, this same image would never have been the same again. The image is composed of complex, multilayered planes of focus. And I love the way people ask for popcorn and tap their dollar bills. Film time and real time are the same.

A beautiful and alluring film about life in a small rural village, the film focuses on the 'rituals' of everyday life; getting water from the river; making rope by hand from sisal; cooking rice and beans over an outdoor fire; planting and harvesting; etc. A lyrical portrait punctuated by haunting songs, the film is recommended for any audience interested in how another people lives. --K. K.

"... introduces us to the intricate system of belief, ritual, performance, and aesthetic values in a service for the gods in Southern Haiti. It exemplifies the close relationships between the gods, the land and the extended family in one rural community. By the film's conclusion we have learned that to serve the gods is to celebrate. And celebration involves drumming, song, dance possession, animal sacrifice, and sharing food. Recommended not only to anthropologists and students of Afro-Caribbean religions, but also to general audiences interested in Haitian life." --American Anthropologist

This film documents a thunderstorm as it rages in full fury above a motel in May on the southern plains. There's sun, wind, clouds, rain and electrical pyrotechnics ... with perhaps a glimpse of a fleeting human figure. But only a glimpse.

From the elephant house of Bronx Zoo to the eight story tall Tabonga Terrace apartments on Sedgwich Avenue, living Mammals scream for their place in the Sun and drop heavy brown excretions in pots of porcelain that splash and clog and suck like huge toothless mouths on the lily-white mounds that lower into the hollow half submerged ovals, creating stagnant damp vacuums that cling and grab.

Two kinds of material are used: 1) Material in the tradition of the "psycho-drama" or "personal film"; 2) Material of the sort used in industrial, educational, or advertising film. Questions are raised about the necessity of using acceptably "artistic" material to make a work of art, as well as about the relationships between "personal" and "impersonal" works. "One of the ways that REMEDIAL READING COMPREHENSION works is in the degree of filmic distance which each image has in the film. Distance here refers to the degree of awareness on the part of the viewer that the image he is watching is a film image, rather than 'reality.' [Land's] film does not try to build up an illusion of reality, to combine the images together with the kind of spatial or rhythmic continuity that would suggest that one is watching 'real' people or objects. It works rather toward the opposite end, to make one aware of the unreality, the created and mechanical nature, of film." -- Fred Camper, Film Culture

"A film like MARE'S TAIL is an epic film flight into an inner space. It is a 2 3/4 hour visual accumulation, which, as it is the film-maker's personal odyssey, becomes the odyssey of each of us.... It flies, swims and moves from point to point-just like each of us. The lines move into shapes which move into orbits and your eyes water into colours. What each of us can see is more than what we do see. The film becomes one of the most vital penetrations into the experience of seeing.... Ranging from the abstract to the figurative form, MARE'S TAIL allows no direct verbal way to give it its position. It not only goes from the abstract to the figurative, in terms of its objective view, but explores the subjective responses as well. It is a classic in film perception." --Steve Dwoskin

Made from some footage I shot on a family vacation way back in 1949. It features my brother Doug and a horse whose name I've forgotten. A circular cybernetic study film. "A visual statement of compelling subtlety." -- James Broughton Collection: Museum of Modern Art, NY. Award: Indiana State University Film Festival, 1970

A (temporary) leave of many friends who are my truest world, with the attempt of getting them together in an ideal summary conceived to support me during my being far away. --A. L.
"... Leonardi's subject matter is happiness and joy, through the choice of image, and through the editing (structuring) and through the camera movement, and the more I see this film the more I want to see it again. "The Book of Saints of Rome" is in my book of living classics." --Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice, Oct. 23, 1969.

This series was inspired by Nancy Golden who, whenever I ride with her, wants me to shoot video for her. She is more interested as video maker in what's happening outside the car while I am more interested in the inside of the car, the driver, and then the world going by. So I decided to do a series of portraits of drivers at night each of which would be the length of the longest mini DV tape available (about 83 minutes). So I shoot continuously while the driver talks. This is my version of 21st century cinema noir.

Tracy and I talk about her quitting her job to move from Boston, experiences working, sexual and gender politics at her work life, how her fathers death effected her film making, and her experiences as a graduate student at Bard.

"Note on snowstorms in February-March '69. The restoration of the landscape. Begun to show friends on west coast violent beauty of this period. Childhood memories, snowball fights, sleddings, etc., and how I felt about Medford where I live kept entering into the film. The principal birds in the film are the blue jay and the crow, both beautiful, smart and ruthless." S.L.

Hand-developed and unedited, this roll lived in my camera from March to May 1995: A trip to New Orleans, a train ride, the death of a dear friend and artist. This film is the author of itself; its trace function leaves me behind. "The cadaverous presence establishes a relation between here and nowhere." -- Maurice Blanchot. "The Phantome disturbs by its just out of reach presence." -- Bruce Witsiepe

Lenny Lipton was born May 18, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York. He wrote the lyrics of the song "Puff, the Magic Dragon" when he was nineteen years old. He is the author of Independent Filmmaking and The Super 8 Book. He lives in California with his wife and daughter. In HAPPY BIRTHDAY LENNY, Mother explains the nature of her love. (File under neurosis.) Exhibition: Robert Flaherty Film Seminar; NY Film Festival.

The Red Mountain Tribe hangs out in my backyard. "Lipton's lovely home movie PEOPLE, in its affection for valuable inconsequential gestures, indicates in the course of its three minutes why there has to be a continuing alternative to the commercial cinema." -- Roger Greenspun, The New York Times

Filmed in Feb. 1972 in Johnson City, N. Y. at Jon's apartment. I came to visit for the weekend with the intent of making this film. Jon and I lugged equipment early Saturday morning and we ended up shooting late in the evening due to technical difficulties and other problems. Jon purchased the film stock and gave much needed technical assistance. Bebe liked the idea of the film and now her elbow is preserved for posterity on celluloid. For more than a year I had only the original print to project because of the lack of funds to invest for duplicate prints; thanks to Ken, I got the 'bread' to finally have a print made. --M. L.

A single 100 ft. roll of 16mm B&W film shot at the zoo last October, 1972. Six months later I soaked the processed film in clorox bleach and had it loop-printed four times with a length of black opaque leader between each print. --M. L.

"A cinematic metaphor conceived for an AIDS compilation film, the film is an 'emotional translation' of the sickness. The juxtaposition of music and images produces conflicts between eiements which would appear meaningless if separated."--program notes from "Always Fair Weather With Scattered Clouds Passing During The Day: Contemporary French Experimental Film and Video" curated by Yann Beauvais

N.B. Sound on Cassette. Sync beginning of sound with image before light blue television images. Generally, start cassette while leader is seen.
"Films highly praised as among earliest in single (double, triple, etc.) frame style by Jonas Mekas (director of Anthology Film Archives, N.Y.C.). Awarded New York State Council of the Arts grant on basis of the films. In 1982 critic Bartlett Naylor in San Fransisco press described the films, including an opening quote by Taylor Mead: 'I shot my home movies with the cheapest, littlest hand-held camera I could buy. And in the low 1960s film was so expensive that I just used the single frame button.' This apology is a modest introduction to a very artful (though decidedly unprofessional in the monetary sense) ten minute ('to twenty') flick that might be called 'The Grand Tour.' The film flickers through a millennium of culture as it would appear to a tourist. It is an intense film, yet, there is an incredible wealth of information surprisingly accesible. Aside from the exciting experience itself, the breakneck history lesson is a reminder that the mind can move in lightning steps: the plodding way information is typically presented is an insult to mental capability." -- T.M.

"My home movies which weigh 2 pounds so far began in Mexico City where I got bored and bought a 50-ft. Keystone at National Pawn Shop-I was immediately turned on-to the City, to Mexico-it really makes a difference-and in 16mm-but I wanted to shoot in color and it costs about 10 dollars/50 ft. in Mexico so I had to push single frame button much of the time-oh me, but its lovely anyway-I kept pushing once I crossed border into U.S. and N.Y. and Malibu" - T.M.

Filmed in 1964-68. Edited in 1968-69.
"Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shot nothing. When one writes diaries, it's a a retrospective process: you sit down, you look back at your day, and you write it all down. To keep a film (camera) diary, is to react (with your camera) immediately, now, this instant: either you get it now, or you don't get it at all. To go back and shoot it later, it would mean restaging, be it events or feelings. To get it now, as it happns, demands the total mastery of one's tools (in this case, Bolex): it has to register the reality to which I react and also it has to register my state of feeling (and all the memories) as I react. Which also means, that I had to do all the structuring (editing) right there, during the shooting, in the camera. All footage that you'll see in the Diaries is exactly as it came out from the camera: there was no way of achieving it in the editing room without destroying its form and content.
WALDEN contains materials from the years 1965-69, strung together in chronological order. For the soundtrack I used some of the sounds that I collected during the same period: voices, subways, much street noise, bits of Chopin (I am a romantic), and other significant and insignificant sounds.
'They tell me, I should be always searching; but I'm only celebrating what I see.' - (from the soundtrack)
'I make home movies - therefore I live. I live-therefore I make home movies.' - (from the soundtrack) -- J.M.

Filmed in 1964-68. Edited in 1968-69.
Walden was Mekas' first diary film, and it was edited as a collection of images gathered between the years 1964 and 1969. Its original title was Diaries, Notes, Sketches, which was the intended name for all of his films (they would each have different subtitles), though when it became too confusing for film laboratories to distinguish between films, Mekas abandoned the practice. He still kept Diaries, Notes, Sketches as a subtitle in Walden, Lost Lost Lost, and In Between, and the name is often used to designate his entire film oeuvre. The sketches in Walden refer to various films that, edited previously, were later included in Walden: Report from Millbrook (1965/1966), Hare Krishna (1966), Notes on the Circus (1966), and Cassis (1966) all occur within the film.
"New York in spring; Tony Conrad; Bibbie in Central Park; A Wedding; Breakfast in Marseilles; Cassis; Sitney leaves New Haven; Fire on 87th Street; Brakhage crosses Central Park; Carl Th. Dreyer; A trip to Millbrook; Flowers for Marie Menken; Gregory Markopolous shoots 'Galaxie'; Notes on the Circus." -- J.M.

Filmed in 1964-68. Edited in 1968-69.
In Walden, he asserts that the images shown are "for myself and for a few others," suggesting an intimate circle of friends. This was in fact true, as Walden's first screening was an informal "first draft" version at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo. By showing details of his family life, and of outings and time spent with friends, Mekas extends an invitation to his viewer to partake in their beauty. [These images] are not much different from what you have seen or experienced," he says in As I Was Moving Ahead. "There is no big difference, no essential difference between you and me." To watch a Mekas film is to experience the intimacy of someone sharing his life with you.
"Kreeping Kreplachs meet (Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Tuli, Warhol, Barbara Rubin, etc)/ Hare Krishna walk; autumn scenes; Sitney's wedding; New Year's Evening in Times Square; Goofing on 42nd Street; UPtown Party; Velevet Underground; Deep of Winter; Naomi visits Ken & Flo Jacobs; Amy stops for Coffee; Coop Directors meet; Dreams of Cocteau; In Central Park' What Leslie saw thru the Coop window; Olmsted Hike." -- J.M.

"In Spring, 1963 Show Magazine called me and asked that I make a film on arts in New York. I told them, why did they want me to make it - didn't they know I was a bit unusual? ... 'We want something unusual,' they said. So I went out and made a newsreel on arts. Show people looked at the rough cut of the film and became very angry. 'But there is nothing about Show Magazine and DuPont fabrics in the movie,' they said. 'What has that to do with the arts in New York!' I said.
The battle was short. The film was destroyed. Really, I have no idea what they did with it. This workprint of the first FILM MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS is the only print in existence, as far as I know." -- J.M.

"REPORT FROM MILLBROOK was filmed in 1965, on a weekend visit to Tim Leary's place. It was a light summer outing. No LSD. Tim took me for a walk, though, and we talked about LSD. I told him that the chemicals that motivate and drive artists are more powerful and mysterious than LSD or any drug. On that note we turned back and ended our walk. There was nothing more to say. In 1966, Tim's place was raided by the local sheriff. The East Village Other taped an interview with the sheriff about the raid. I used the interview as the soundtrack for the film. The footage can also be seen in a different form in DIARIES, NOTES & SKETCHES." -- J.M.

"A continuation of my film diaries. The footage covers the period from 1969 to 1984. During the same period I shot much more footage than what you see in HE STANDS... I am including in this film only the most impersonal footage. Originally, I was planning to call this film ANTHROPOLOGICAL SKETCHES. It consists of scenes, sketches of people, activities, happenings, events outside - or almost outside - of my life which I am observing from a slight distance. There are some sketches that are from my personal life, I included them to balance, to warm up the impersonal material. There will be two more films from the same period: one will include all my 'personal' material (home, friends), the other all my 'abstract' material.
The film consists of 124 brief sketches, each half-a-minute to about two minutes long. Portraits of people I have spent time with, places, seasons of the year, weather (storms, snow blizzards, etc.), many of my film-maker friends such as Hans Richter, Rossellini, Marcel Hanoun, Adolfo Arrieta, Henri Langlois, Cavalcanti, Kubelka, Ken Jacobs, Kenneth Anger, Kuchars, Breer, Willard Van Dyke, Frampton, etc., or just friends, such as John Lennon, Jackie Onassis, Lee Radzwill, John Kennedy Jr. & Caroline, Tina and Anthony Radziwill, Peter Beard, Andy Warhol, Richard Foreman, P. Adams Sitney, Yoko Ono, Raimund Abraham, Hermann Nitsch, Allen Ginsberg, George Maciunas, and countless others - streets and parks of New York - brief escapes into nature, out of town - nothing spectacular, all very insignificant, unimportant - misc. celebrations of life that has gone, by now, and remains only as recorded in these personal, brief sketches. 'You keep a diary & the diary will keep you.' - Mae West, to Peter Beard (from the film)" -- J.M.

"Filmed in 1949-1963, edited 1976.
These six reels of my film diaries come from the years 1949-1963. They begin with my arrival in New York in November 1949. The first and second reels deal with my life as a Young Poet and a Displaced Person in Brooklyn. It shows the Lithuanian immigrant community, their attempts to adapt themselves to a new land and their tragic efforts to regain independance for their native country. It shows my own frustrations and anxieties and the decision to leave Brooklyn and move to Manhattan.
Reel three and reel four deal with my life in Manhattan on Orchard Street and East 13th St. First contacts with New York poetry and filmmaking communities. Robert Frank shooting THE SIN OF JESUS. LeRoy Jones, Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara reading at The Living Theatre. Documentation of the political protests of the late fifties and early sixties. First World Strike for Peace. Vigil in Times Square. Women for Peace. Air Raid protests.
Reel five includes Rabbit Shit Haikus, a series of Haikus filmed in Vermont; scenes at the Film-Maker's Cooperatives; filming HALLELUJAH THE HILLS; scenes of New York City.
Reel six contains a trip to Flaherty Seminar, a visit to the seashore in Stony Brook; a portrait of Tiny Tim; opening of TWICE A MAN; excursions to the countryside seen from two different views; that of my own and that of Ken Jacobs whose footage is incorporated into this reel.
The period I am dealing with in these six reels was a period of desperation, of attempts to desparately grow roots into the new ground, to create new memories. In these six painful reels I tried to indicate how it feels to be in exile, how I felt in those years. These reels carry the title LOST, LOST, LOST, the title of a film myself and my brother wanted to make in 1949, and it indicates the mood we were in, in those years. It describes the mood of a Displaced Person who hasn't yet forgotten the native country but hasn't gained a new one. The sixth reel is a transitional reel where we begin to see some relaxation, where I begin to find moments of happiness. New life begins. What happens later, you'll have to see the next installment of reels ..."
-- J.M., March 31, 1976.
Jonas Mekas

"Filmed in 1977, edited in 1979.
These reels of my film diaries contain the film 'notes' taken during the calendar year 1977, arranged chronologically. The film is divided into six parts. The first part takes place in New York. We see a lot of home life and the city. We see a lot of our daughter Oona whose third year of life this is. Some other subjects: Peter's Concert (Peter Kubelka); A visit to Marie Deren (Maya's mother); St. Patrick's Parade; Spring in Central Park; etc. The second, very brief part, takes place in Sweden, visiting Anna Lena Wibom. The third part takes place in Lithuania. Myself, my wife Hollis, and our 2-1/2 year old daughter oona visit my mother on the occasion of her 90th birthday. Oona meets her young cousins, we drink home made beer, we walk through the woods, gather mushrooms and wild strawberries, we fool around. The fourth part is Austria, visiting Peter Kubelka and Hermann Nitsch in Prinzendorf. We taste Hermann's wine, we talk to Peter's donkeys, we visit Pater Nicolaus in Kremsmuenster, and then we go to Italy, with Peter, in pursuit of Michelangelo's wine, Canaiola. The sixth part is back in New York; a visit to Willard Van Dyke, upstate; Oona's third birthday; a fire on Broome Street; more home scenes; the beginning of winter storms.
It's a diary film but also it is a meditation on the theme of Paradise. It is a letter to Oona; to serve her, some day, as a distant reminder of how the world around her looked during the third year of her life - a period of which there will be only tiny fragments left in her memory - and to provide her with a romantic's guide to the essential values of life - in a world of artificiality, commercialism, and bodily and spiritual poison." -- J.M.

These are too tiny or too obvious for comment, but one or two are my dearest children. "It is a very personal film which she keeps adding to ... a masterpiece of filmic fragments, only shown once, but wow!" -- P. Adams Sitney

Street images, sounds and fragments of stories merge in constant states of transition, suggesting the process by which stories grow.
Attention is captured, the storyteller revealed. Yet the outcome is ambiguous, reflecting the less than final understanding that knowing someone through their stories involves.

Oscillating between a street festival in Philadelphia, the slave forts and capitol city of Ghana, and the New Jersey shore, American Hunger, explores the relationship between personal experience and collective histories. American fantasies confront African realities. African realities confront American fantasies. African fantasies confront American realities. American realities confront African fantasies...
Available on DVD/Blu Ray

Photographed on location in Harlem, Ethiopia, Forged Ways combines elements of documentary, narrative, and experimental film form. Structurally the film cycles between the first person account of filmmaker, the third person experience of a man navigating the streets of Harlem, and day-to-day life in cities and villages of Ethiopia. By subduing any definitive story-line or "message" the film functions as an audio visual meditation on the constructs surrounding African American cultural identity while simultaneously examining some of the more subtle implications involved in maintaining an identity that spans hundreds of years, and thousands of miles.

Originally super-8 blown up to 16mm Produced and directed by Vivian Ostrovsky. Edited by Ostrovsky and Gisele Meichler. Sound by Ostrovsky and Patrick Genet. From Paris to Berlin, from Amsterdam to Rio, from Jerusalem to New York. With a Super 8 camera shooting only at night. Hungarian crooners, Indian tribal chants, opera arias and an occasional samba make up the soundtrack of this "hand-held" diary.

Originally super-8 blown up to 16mm Produced and directed by Vivian Ostrovsky. Edited by Ostrovsky and Gisele Meichler. Sound by Ostrovsky and Patrick Genet. A month in the country. In summer, a group of friends rent a house in southern France. People come and go, making their way through chickens, dogs and cats. Playful sounds and a wacky collage of music make up the soundtrack.

Originally super-8 blown up to 16mm Produced and directed by Vivian Ostrovsky. Edited by Ostrovsky and Jean Pecheux. Sound by Ostrovsky and Patrick Genet. Sarah and Paul leave their native California once a year to eat their way through France. They test the Michelin guide's recommendations for three-star ratings (the top rating) and between meals still have time to do some wine-tasting at the best cellars. The filmmaker follows them around in a second car...

Lies Phil Spector Told Me combines actual entries from Parnes' mother's high school diary with that of her own. These entries meld into one horrific teenage melodrama, which could only be told through the music of the queens of white trash: The Shangri-Las.

A portrait of Dana Plays' 90 year old paternal grandmother, Peggy Regler, reminiscing about her love affairs and significant relationships. Regler tells about her failed first marriage, the agreement she had to stay until the children were grown (but to see other lovers) which resulted in the true love she found with her second husband and renowned writer Gustav Regler, who later died a tragic death in India. The love affairs are historically rooted in the political and technological developments 20th century, and are narratively based in a complex sound/image structure. Interludes (silent optically printed film passages narrated with inter-titles excerpted from her diaries, and early childhood memories) formalistically refer to early cinema. The footage in these passages is re-contextualized and interwoven metaphorically throughout the text.

The Mindscape series is an experiment in a kind of 'diary' film dealing with specific periods in my life in terms of images, not of events. A sort of progress report to myself on the state of my mind -- in that sense a private film not meant to communicate.

A portrait of a place in the context of being an outsider; a personal travelogue working to concentrate the perceived qualities of life, light, and the spirit of the island. The textural dynamics of sound and image were strongly considered in the editing process to crystallize my observation and experience while there.

Internal Combustion breaks the many silences surrounding
lesbians and AIDS. Interweaving the voices of two friends, Internal
Combustion reflects on the often unspoken tensions within this
epidemic of survival and power and mourning and loss. Co-
directed by Alisa Lebow

A set of four short shorts referencing supposedly insignificant creatures to explore Rosenthal's lifelong topic of human identity and values. In the first, her father speaks of a spider sharing his underground bomb shelter; in the second, insects and reptiles combine body parts; in the third, flies attempt to escape the bus she is riding form a repressive nation to a free one; and in the fourth, a colony of ants bury their dead in her children's toy. Her themes of irony and tragedy are apparent. Original music and photos by DJ RoBeat; appropriated music by Arlo Guthrie

HOW MUCH DOES THE MONKEY REMEMBER (1988) : Ventriloquism performance: Improv by Rosenthal and The Monkey: Can you be able to say it, and yet not say it aloud, because even though you could say it, you have no idea what it means? SEMAPHORE POEMS (1986): The late poet Hannah Weiner reprises her performance. The poet, the birds and the video communicate separately as hard as they can, but what can we, or even they, understand at all? I CAN TALK BURP TALK (1988): Performer: Ola Creston, age 9. She can and she does. Single shot improv. WORDS COME OUT BACKWARDS (2004): "Last night I was up talking to myself, when the words appeared visimagically before my lips." NONSENSE CONVERSATION (1988): A Barbara Rosenthal short performance video, in which her own voice gives way to that of others speaking her words.

'Ola Writes the Alphabet' is a 'decisive moment' in both video and child development by a consummate artist of video vert. At her mother's prompting, Ola Creston, the artist's daughter at age 3, recalls some letters perfectly, but others only with great creative latitude, letting us see into the development of letter-forms in a young brain. An extremely straight-forward, observational presentation with no filmmaker-type interference, this DVD was originally shot in 1982 on black and white 1/2" open reel videotape. It is a boundary-crossing work that can find audiences among child and family psychologist, neurologists, linguists, educator, parents and children themselves, well beyond this artist's usual base within video history and the avant-garde.

This video pioneer (appearing briefly) records her father, Leon Rosenthal, telling about a large spider in an underground bomb shelter with him when he was a radio switchboard operator in Hilo, Hawaii, during WWII. It is a single-take 2 minute piece that gives insight into the artist's lifelong explorations into the meaning of the being human, the search for identity, respect for life itself, and the personality as paramount.

TREYF -"unkosher" in Yiddish - is an unorthodox documentary
by and about two Jewish lesbians who met and fell in love at a
Passover "seder". With personal narration, real and imagined
educational films, and haunting imagery, filmmakers Alisa Lebow
and Cynthia Madansky examine the Jewish identity of their
upbringings and its impact on their lives. Incisive cultural critics,
astute, poignant, and poetic -never cynical- they weave their way
from New York to Jerusalem in pursuit of a progressive, secular
Jewish identity that draws from their childhood reminiscences as
much as from their contemporary queer lives. Co-directed by Alisa
Lebow.

"The editing of ANOTHER SHOT is really quite, quite good, I think...Nick Dorsky make the most extensive and interesting comments I have heard about ANOTHER SHOT. He was interested by the transposition of subject and viewer, i.e. film begins with viewer observing your (the filmmaker's) face, later your face appears to be observing the walking figure (Pierre), and at the end the figure has become the viewer or imaginer who walks off into the film image. Interestingly, he thought that I was Pierre and that this was my film. When I explained, he agreed that your film fits both in feeling and technique with my work--however, the autobiographical aspect seems to me very vivid and distinct."--Tom Chomont.
"A self-portrait."--D.S.

"...is a portrait of the American experimental filmmaker Tom Chomont, who resided in Eruope from 1969-1975, before returning to New York.
"During the two years preceding his return to the United States he resided in Amsterdam with Daniel Singelenberg. The subject of the film is their friendship and, more precisely, the sadness of losing a lover. In the autumn of 1977, Tom Chomont came back to Amsterdam, on the occasion of a retrospective exposition of his work in the cinema 'De Melkweg' (The Milky Way). The greater part of the film was made during this period.
"The music is by Billie Holiday and by Richard Strauss: from 'Vierletzte Lieder' (Four Last Songs, 1949), 'Im Abendrot' (At Sunset) with words by Joseph von Eichendorff and sung by Gundula Janowitz, soprano, accompanied by the Philharmonic Orchestra of Berlin under the direction of Herbert von Karajan."--From the program of the XI Biennale de Paris, 1980.

GOODBYE FILM docuements my leaving Nexus Contemporary Arts Center in Atlanta, in 1985. Everyone says goodbye. Obviously, this plays peculiarly like a combination home movie/conceptual work to anyone else. Who are these people? Why the varying degrees of emoting? It's unclear if absence or compressed presence is documented. ASHVILLE SNARL contains a number of experiments , mostly wth soundtrack, using a Magnasync recorder to create an authentic violence utilized in other films. Like EXPERIMENTS, this reel presents material in its "raw" state, before the devices presented were later worked into other structures.

This is a film created from a number of found, undeveloped home movies; additional material concerned directly with sexuality and pornography was added. The whole, fading, becomes simultaneously text and subtext. This was a unique opportunity to rework unseen material, to colonize it.

"Casual conversation, poetry, ambient sounds metaphorically arranged with scenes in New York City and the outer reaches of Long Island-an attempt to find equivalents for certain states of feeling."-H.S.

"...began as a 8mm home movie footage from which vertain shots were selected. Each shot was then named by a word or phrase, These words were used to construct a narrative whihc in turn formed the basis for ordering the images in the film. The result is a sort of anthropological detective story, an attempt to create meaning from the remnants of culture." C.W.

Dedicated to William Balough. With "Bucky Peckerhead" Balough (Age 70), Ice Box, Zunda, and G.Y.: "A super-8 work diary which records various episodes as we renovate and reclaim bricks from the former Charles Parker building in Yalesville, Connecticut. The problem of cleaning the bricks, one by one, was solved by Bucky's orderly method, which he devised while working for the WPA in the 1930's. 'Let the tool do the work' was his advice to us, and since he owned more tools than anyone I've met, the job was simplified. Every so often, I would set up the camera, turn it on, and go back to work. The result is this narrative work, edited in-camera. Bucky died in 1980, and at least he was able to see the film (he laughed), so I dedicate this to him, one of the great originals I have had the pleasure of knowing." - G.Y.

A personal documentary video in which the relationship of a mother with her two young daughters is examined -- finding the terrain chaotic and hardly conforming to prior expectations.
Weaving in and out through multi-linear and noisy layers, the mother interviews the daughters, one daughter interviews the mother, the daughters play together, the mother reprimands the daughters, they have breakfast and get ready for school and work together, the mother reads a poem, the daughters read a fairy story, nuclear reactors seem to be a part of it, Amelia Earhart makes appearances, texts refer to the musings of the mother.
All these elements pile on top of one another in apparent chaos. But some ideas emerge, and one could leave without feeling uncomfortable about the chaos. The children, at least, are strong.

I am just a rambling guy - here today, gone tomorrow. Sitting in the back of Dan's french car. French woman going to NYC for the first time. Reflections of the car - now static. Chicago as seen from Gunnar Juhansson's and Ruby Rich's apartment.
N.B. Project at 18fps

Part two of a series about relationships and the personal connection between individuals that is remembered and idealized by one partner about the other. This is the more visual of the two, concentrating on patterns and masking rather than dressing the body with clothes.

Part one of a series about relationships and the personal connection between individuals that is remembered and idealized about one partner about the other. This, this first part of the series talks about the potential of the relationship.

"Joel Schlemowitz is a wizard of cinema, and this collection of short experimental films is a marvel to behold. Each piece is a unique gem - quirky, provocative, playful, often handmade, and always daring - celebrating Joel's astonishing mastery of the tools of filmmaking, and his poetic grasp on the art of cinema." - Alan Berliner

Fern Silva's "Notes from a Bastard Child" consists of an unsettled but concise capsule portrait of interconnected fatherless entities, including a fading Portuguese village and Jesus Christ.
-Mark Holcomb
TimeOut New York

Unlike the world wars and Korea, not many films have come out of the murderous fatigue of Viet Nam. Perhaps that's because it's not easy to make a film about a difficult, complicated war. Walter Ungerer set out to make a film about the decision facing a conscientious American youth when he is drafted. Arthur, the hero (played by Columbia University student Arthur Albert) is drafted and unsure of what to do. Slowly we are introduced to three sets of characters whose decisions ultimately determine the course of Arthur's resolution to his dilemma, and thus his life.
First comes a group of non-Americans. Then a second group consisting of actual friends, family and acquaintances of Arthur the actor. Finally, the third group, an intriguing cross-section of Americans: teenie boppers, suburbanites, Green Berets, an artist and a Spanish American War vet. The final solution is brought about by bringing the non-Americans together in an auditorium, showing them all the previously shot footage and asking them to vote on what they think Arthur should do.

It is at once an experimental film and a documentary. It illuminates three difficult years in filmmaker Walter Ungerer's life: the sudden and painful end to a seventeen year marriage. In search of answers for the cause of his circumstances, he embarks on a series of interviews with people themselves afflicted with pain and suffering.
Though a film about filmmaker Walter Ungerer at a particularly difficult time in his life, down the road is a journey we all take. It is a road we all travel as we face our own mortality.

This stunningly emotional film is about duty, heroism, pride and loss as seen in the home movies of a military family. The piece takes you on a journey inward, towards family and identity. Although it might seem preoccupied with loss, in its pensive music it is actually a song of hope - a wish for the future.

The Abortion Diaries is a documentary featuring 12 women who speak candidly about their experiences with abortion. The women are doctors, subway workers, artists, activists, military personnel, teachers and students; they are Black, Latina, Jewish and White; they are mothers or child-free; they range in age from 19 to 54. Their stories weave together with the filmmaker's diary entries to present a compelling, moving and at times surprisingly funny "dinner party" where the audience is invited to hear what women say behind closed doors about motherhood, medical technology, sex, spirituality, love, work and their own bodies.

Obar is a super-8 portrait of a New Mexico ghost town. Disembodied oral histories of water dowsing and train hoping provide insight into the towns possibilities and failures, while time lapse images of the desolate landscape paint an eerie portrait of life on the wild frontier.

All Women Are Equal is a black and white 15- minute documentary filmed in Nottingham England in 1972, about Paula, a male to female transsexual made by veteran lesbian filmmaker Marguerite Paris (1934-2007). This very early and non-exploitative representation of an ordinary well- adjusted transgendered person is historically significant for its treatment of the subject. While other films may have depicted drag queens and other performers (such as Frank Simon's 1968 feature The Queen), they were not made by a women. Also unique is that Paris produced, directed, shot and edited this film, which, unlike there other representations, allows the individual to tell her own personal story, without resorting to spectacle or focusing on performativity. Through Paris's lens, see Paula fixing her make up and discussing the difficulty of living as a woman and meeting other trans people. The discussion is remarkably detailed and offers incredible insights into both the time and Paul's individual psyche.
The film was shot on East German 16mm B&W reversal film stock, and edited with cement splices. The sound was recorded on 1/4" reel to reel tape, then transferred to mag stock, and finally united with the edited reversal original, which had been mag striped.

I watch people in the streets and wonder why they keep on living, I have lived my whole life with a God-awful pain. I don't understand what it means to enjoy a sunset. I don't understand how people keep on living. I ask people: "Why don't you kill yourself?"

All my life I wanted to come to New York and be an artist. My dream finally came true. I met the most amazing women...artists, musicians, filmmakers. I looked at them one day and thought: "Oh my God I'm at the center of the world!" And then my life went to hell......

I met and filmed Aileen Wuornos on death row in Florida in 1997. We had been corresponding for 5 years and Aileen had asked me to film her talking about the truth of her life and crimes as part of her preparation to die. I have been trying to finish this feature length documentary since then. But can't. There is something wrong with me. Instead I make two minute trailers about other films I'd like to make. This is a trailer of trailers.

A portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran.
The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) LENARD, A Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Grave Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bone -- small and large -- of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of "Winne the Pooh" into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs' essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a childrens's performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.
"A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story...a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy." - George Robinson, The Jewish Week

This video is made up of footage that I took with my Sony from the television newscasts during the collapse of the USSR, with the home noises in the background. It's a capsule record of what happened and how it happened during that crucial period as recorded by the television newscasters. It can be also viewed as a classic Greek drama in which the destinies of nations are changed drastically by the unbending, boarding on irrational. Will of one single man, one small nation determined to regain it freedom, backed by Olympus in its fight against the Might & Power, against the impossible.

I made this video June 23, 2001, as a letter for my good friend Penny Arcade who some days earlier had asked me why I love New York. I truly love New York! This letter to Penny Ar44cade is my love letter to New York.

One hour with a women's drumming group led by Layne Redmond, who has devoted her life to reviving the ancient Mediterranean tradition of women's ceremonial drumming and ritual celebrations. Using one of the world's oldest known instruments, the small hand held frame drum, the Mob of Angels create a contemporary music that pulses with the rhythms of an archaic language.

Made for Guggenheim Museum's travelling exhibition on Andy Warhol's Factory Years. The video traces the history of the Factory, describes the activities that took place in it, and the historical context. Actual locations are shown and described

Four part video made in 2003,2004. Pts. 1 & 2 were presented at the 2003 Venice Biennale as part of the Utopia Station project. An open-ended video --- more parts may be added in the future -- my thoughts on the idea of Utopia. My thoughts on it change as time goes on, as I am trying to figure it out myself, the meaning of it, the prectice of it, the possibility of it, in the past, today and in the future.

An homage to two ramshackle cities, made up of footage shot while wandering. I meander city streets with a camera, looking to be haunted by unfamiliar vistas. I find solace in the forgotten landscapes, odd voices on a ham radio, shimmering water in a desolate harbor. Later I attack the film, moving it this way and that, trying to squeeze it against its will, wrest strangeness from the everyday.

A tattered diary film. Middle age concerns swirl around me in Brooklyn and follow to North Carolina, and New Orleans (before the storm) and back home again. Video journal entries mix with 35mm abstract film images, sublime and inviting, suggesting an elegy for celluloid. As friends drift away I retreat into myself. Solipsism beckons, and I stave it off, barely. I contemplate my body falling apart, my kids growing up, changes and disappearances.

"One of the most incredible movies at Tribeca [2010] is, at 49 minutes in length, probably the least commercial: Dustin Thompson's avant-garde documentary [The] Travelogues ... He is a democratic tourist: a lover, an Italian cathedral, and surfers in a Munich river carry equal narrative weight. The mini-narratives, however, are distinguished between differing angles and speeds; form sets them apart. This is fantastic stuff, a festival film that makes you feel that life in worth living, and Tribeca worth attending." -Howard Feinstein, Filmmaker Magazine
Also available on Blue Ray Disc and HDCAM.

Life-Loss--Love-Loss-Death
Leads the viewer head-on into the complex intimacy between two sisters and their losses, both growing up, and by the death of one.
This is the Book of Laughs, the fairy tale promise of good times. These sisters have touched and held on to each other through many frightening nights, and they have laughed.

The movie Patch Adams starring Robin Williams made the physician-social-crusader-clown world famous. This documentary offers a revealing encounter with the real Patch Adams. Here we see exclusive sequences of his "Between-the-Sheets Therapy" with a disturbed, suicidal patient named Dave, which show how far the doctor is willing to go to find a way to relieve a person's suffering. No one in the world has ever used this as a therapeutic tool. There are other touching examples of Dr. Adams' inimitable, creative approach to caring for patients in different parts of the world. And for the first time ever we are allowed to see his unique "Joy Workshop."

The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed her the West Bank. Director Lynne Sachs creates a film on the violence of the Middle East by exchanging letters with an Israeli friend. Together, they reveal Revital's story through her films, news reports, and interviews, culminating in heartbreaking footage of children discussing the violence they've witnessed. Without taking sides or casting blame, the film becomes a cine-essay on fear and filmmaking, tragedy and transformation, violence and the land of Israel/Palestine.

Short documentary. In 1976, the filmmaker's father, Jonas Mekas, made a film called Paradise Not Yet Lost. Many scenes in the film were street scenes of Soho, New York City from 1967-75. Twenty years later, the filmmaker creates a record of Soho from the 60s, 70s & 90s, revisiting the neighborhood with her video camera and juxtaposing images from Mr. Mekas' 1976 film.

Is What Was is an experimental documentary film essay that began as a visual diary of a visit to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin, where gay men were tortured and murdered by the Nazis. My friend Wilhelm Hein brought me to that place in 2007 where I first saw a Pink Triangle that was worn by one of my ancestors-in-spirit. Around the same time I had begun to find vernacular photographs (snapshots) of Nazi soldiers that had been taken by their compatriots during the time of the Holocaust. These photographs were found in disassembled album at flea markets and in private collections in America and Europe. The contradiction between the Nazi persecution of gay men and the visual evidence in the photographs prompted an inquiry into the context in which sexual identity is formulated. This inquiry led directly to the pioneering work of Karl Heinrich Ulruchs (1825-1895). Although Ulrich's ideas of same gender sexuality are steeped in 19th Century imagery, he was nonetheless the first to name it, describe it, and promote it in positive, constructive terms that included not only the sexual aspects of Queer life, but sought to find the whole person in the andere sexualitaet (the other sexuality). Through the understanding of pride and power the contradiction in the photographs can be deciphered, and Ulrichs' "Raethsel" (riddle) can be resolved: Queer Identity encompasses more than sexuality, and therein lays the threat to the power structures of oppression. The film intercuts present day images of Sachsenhausen and Berlin created by photographer Sean Michael Kirk, with the vernacular photographs and moving images to create this experimental visual essay. Credits and Cast:
Jerry Tartaglia Writer, Director, Editor
Sean M. Kirk Imaging and Photography
Tyler Arcaro Art Direction and Technical Assistant
Special Appearances by:
Vaginal Davis Jackie Raynal
Jim Hubbard Oscar Villegas
Marc Siegel Susanna Sachsse
Joshua Schneider Wilhelm Hein
Annette Frick John Price

The 17 minute film is an intimate document of a person as he dying from an infection associated with HIV. It has been edited to create the illusion that the viewer is looking at camera "rushes" or unedited "dailies" of a movie. This editorial choice affords the viewers an unencumbered emotional response to what they are seeing on the screen. See For Yourself is a silent film, shot largely in the San Francisco Bay Area in the Autumn of 1993. This film's subject is the filmmaker's friend, David Kline, who requested that this film be made in order for "people to see for themselves what A.I.D.S. look like." David Kline died in September 1993. Berlin International Film Festival Official Selection, 1996.

Wasted Days (2004) 5min- A visualization of the poem of the same name by Oscar Wilde. Via Dolorosa (2005) 7 min- Shot in Chinchon, Spain and Lobachsville, Pennsylvania, this piece is an elegy, in memory of a friend who died suddenly. Sede Vacante (2006) 4min- The chair is empty-and has been for many centuries. Denkmal (2007) 8 min- The memorial to the victims of Nazism in Berlin.

In collaboration with Ruthie Marantz. When shooting SUSIE'S GHOST, I was mourning the loss of my older sister and my photography and the performance of collaborator Ruthie Marantz express a diffuse sense of loss. Is she looking for something? Is she really there? Is she really gone? The film was shot in my Manhattan downtown neighborhood before the housing bubble burst and construction mania had not yet obliterated the last traces of the manufacturing district I'd moved to 35 years earlier. That too has passed.

I began reading Virgil's Georgics, a 1st Century epic agricultural poem, and knew immediately that I needed to create a visual equivalent about my own relationship to the place where I live, New York City. The film is culled from material I collected at Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Socrates Sculpture Garden in Queens, a Brooklyn community garden and a place on Staten Island that is so dark you can see the three moons of Jupiter. It is a homage to a place many people affectionately and mysteriously call the big apple.

"For two hours we stroll with Jonas Mekas through New York nights, through apartments, studios, backstage rooms, bars and clubs. We meet old acquaintances like Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramovic, friends, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and also many new acquaintances. The father of the diary film begins with the words 'I can't sleep.' Who hasn't been in that situation. Sleepy and yet wide awake, you find yourself in the world of those exhausted from the day's exertions. In Sleepless Nights Stories we witness (approximately) 25 tales from a thousand and one nights - remnants of films by one of the greatest avant-garde filmmakers whose life rewrote film history"--Berlinale 2011. "SLEEPLESS NIGHTS STORIES originated from my readings of the One Thousand and One Nights. But unlike the Arabian tales, my stories are all from real life, though at times they too wander into somewhere else, beyond the everyday routine reality. There are some twenty-five different stories in my movie. Their protagonists are all my good friends and I myself am an inseparable part of the stories. The storyteller of the Arabian Nights was also part of his or her tales. Some of the people in the movie you'll recognize, some not. The fact that some of them you'll recognize has no bearing on the stories: after all, we all recognize John Wayne or Annette Benning, but in their stories they are no longer the people we know. The subjects of the stories cover a wide range of emotions, geographies, personal anxieties, anecdotes. These are not very big stories, not for the Big Screen: these are all personal big stories . . . And yes, you'll also find some provocations . . . But that's me, one "me" of many. The very question "What is a story?" is a provocative question. LOCATIONS AND CAST -- [INTRO] Staff of . . . Masters [STORY 1 -- THE STORY OF MARINA] Marina Abramovic, Chrissie Iles [STORY 2 -- THE STORY OF CAROLEE] Sebastian Mekas, Benn Northover, Carolee Schneemann [STORY 3 -- THE STORY OF GREENPOINT] Ken Jacobs, Florence Jacobs [STORY 4 -- THE STORY OF THE LIZARD OF LUCCA] Sebastian Mekas [STORY 5] Louise Bourgeois [STORY 6] Yoko Ono [STORY 7 -- THE STORY OF DOUBT] Phong Bui, Raimond Abraham, Nathalie Provosty [STORY 8 -- THE STORY OF LEFTY] Harmony Korine, Rachel Korine (Simon), Lefty Korine [STORY 9 -- JEAN-JACQUES GIVES GOOD ADVICE TO HIS FRIENDS] Jean-Jacques Lebel, Hans Ulrich Obrist [STORY 10 -- THE STORY OF LOUIS] Louis Garrel, Sebastian Mekas, Benn Northover [STORY 11] Sebastian Mekas, Luxemburg Guy, Pip Chodorov, Benn Northover [STORY 12] Raimond Abraham, Dodo, Violinist [STORY 13 -- THE STORY OF THE TREE] Benn Northover, Sebastian Mekas, Hopi Lebel, Kristijonas Kucinskas, Tomas [STORY 14] Sebastian Mekas, Benn Northover, Pip Chodorov [STORY 15 -- THE STORY OF PEEKSKILL] Dalius Naujokaitis, Audrius Naujokaitis, Jonas Lozoraitis [STORY 16 -- THE STORY OF AMY, OR WHY NORMAL PEOPLE SING IN MIDDLE CLASS VOICES] Dalius Naujokaitis [STORY 17 -- THE STORY OF LEE] Lee Stringer [STORY 18 -- THE STORY OF ARTAUD] Jean-Jacques Label, Sebastian Mekas, Benn Northover, Hopi Lebel, Pip Chodorov [STORY 19] Patti Smith, Benn Northover [STORY 20 -- THE STORY OF DIANE AND PIRANESI] Raimond Abraham, Phong Bui, Diane Lewis, Nathalie Provotsy, Pip Chodorov, Sebastian Mekas [STORY 21] Sebastian Mekas, Kristijonas Kucinskas [STORY 22] Dalius Naujokaitis [STORY 23 -- FLUXUS VIOLIN] [STORY 24 -- THE STORY OF THE WOODS OF MY CHILDHOOD] French Children [STORY 25] Adolfas Mekas, Oona Mekas [STORY 26] Bjork Gudmundsdottir

Music: Charlie Morrow, DJ Robeat, Matthew Lee Knowles, Virgil Segal, Brandstifter. Language: English with some translated German. Shot in New York, London and Berlin, this experimental documentary performance narrative is a tongue-in-cheek video fable that tells the tale of an artist struck by the extreme, sustained physical exertion of ordinary workmen. She seeks meaning in her own life by searching for the reasons behind their seeming enjoyment of "backbreaking work for the pleasure of others." She decides to practice yoga to strengthen her own body and open her heart, but feels inadequate to the task, so she sets out on a quest to find a guru-worker to tell her why they work so hard. Feeling guilty that her own heart is not so pure, she tries to avoid detection and arrest, but that inevitably happens. While in prison she meets 12 hard-working prostitutes who do manage to open her heart, then 4 little girls show us what is and is not valued as labor in contemporary society. By the end, the construction worker's words of wisdom provide a surprising insight that can only exist in Rosenthal's absurdist universe, which, of course, tells much about our own. Includes evocative, powerful original jazz and experimental music by Charlie Morrow and four other composers, additional text, video, audio and performance by DJ RoBeat, Super-8 footage by Bill Creston, and images from Rosenthal's extensive library. Premiered at Directors Lounge Internationall Film Festival, Berlin, Feb. 2012. LIMITED EDITION OF 30 SIGNED/NUMBERED

Seemingly simple and straightforward, as is characteristic of all Rosenthal's work, "HOT AND COLD SHAKEUP" was actually fabricated using one trick of videography, and one fakery of physics. Also characteristic of this life/art creator, is puns and idioms appear in some way, and that her inspiration sparks from real experience. This idea came in a flash while thinking about a love affair. So you get the idea, alternate titles included the following
"I'm So Stuck On You I'm Not Normal."
"He's No Great Shakes But He Gets Me Off."
"I'm No Great Shakes But I Get Him Off."
"No Great Shakes But We Get Off."
"Can't Shake Him When He's Hot, Can't Shake Him When He's Cold."
"Can't Shake Him When I'm Hot, Can't Shake Him When I'm Cold."
As of March, 2012, this video has not yet premiered, although it has been shown in previews at eMediaLoft.org, NY.
LIMITED EDITION OF 30 SIGNED/NUMBERED.

A 1-minute performance video in which a toy hotrod revs up, races through its shallow depth of field and crashes into the camera. Although one of her very simplest videos, "CAR COMING" is yet another example of Rosenthal's zany investigations into threat and safety, seriousness and play, time and space, size and scale, life and art. Never shown at the time it was first shot or for almost 20 years, this video finally premiered as a loop in a small Rosenthal installation at Fusion Art Museum in New York, in the September, 2009 exhibition "Art of the Crash" curated by Shalom Neuman.

"BIRD RESCUE" is a stationary camera recording made during 10 minutes of one day in 1997, when, while talking in their loft at 727 Avenue of the Americas, NY, artists Barbara Rosenthal and Bill Creston reallize that a bird, possibly an escaped domesticated parakeet, has gotten trapped between the chicken-wire enforced privacy-glassed panes of their fire-escape windows, and they try to rescue it. This video is PART ONE, in which they free the bird from between the panes, only to have it fly into the loft itself. Coming soon: PART TWO, in which Bill gently catches the creature, it plays dead, and then happily surprises them by flying out the window. Never shown when it was made, nor for over a decade thereafter, this video was premiered as an installation-loop during Rosenthal's show of Flying Art at Morgenvogel, Berlin in 2010.

Languages: UNIMPORTANT OVERHEARD BACKGROUND CONVERSATIONS IN ENGLISH AND FINNISH AND OTHER LANGUAGES. I shot the "FLY BUS (OUT OF RUSSIA) INTO FINLAND"footage, which you see in toto, with just a few bad frames cut from the beginning, and the last segment stretched in time so you can watch it better, on the bus from St. Petersburg, Russia to Helsinki, Finland in 2007. I'd had a big show of cartoon prints and books, and animation videos in Moscow, and then gone to the small village about 5 hours north by train where Dostoyevsky summered called Starya Russa. I'd wanted to relax for a few days there, and then another few days at another small village 2 hours farther north before going on the Puppet Theater and Hostel in St. Petersburg. But I was expelled from Starra Russa, under threat of arrest, because my papers were not in order, forced to give up my train tickets, my luggage taken from me and handed to the driver, as I was pushed onto a bus by the hotel concieriege. In St. Petersburg, $250 of backshish replaced my papers, which then allowed me to making this trip out of the country altogether. The journey was exemplified, I thought as I traveled, by this little creature accompanying me: both feeling we couldn't escape fast enough on our way to the free world. Premiered as an installation-loop during Rosenthal's show of Flying Art at Morgenvogel, Berlin in 2010. LIMITED EDITION OF 30, SIGNED AND NUMBERED.

"WORDS COME OUT BACKWARDS WHEN SPOKEN TO SCREEN LEFT": One irregularly-shaped portrait still of Barbara Rosenthal shot by Bill Creston purses her lips to speak, and out comes a strange configuration of letters on the screen as we hear her voice recite them in ways much more familiar. How did she think up this project? She answers, "Last night I was awake talking to myself, when the words appeared visimagically before my lips, and kept coming out. If you were on my right and saw them also, they'd be backwards coming forwards as they were." This video is yet another example of how Rosenthal apprehends the same universe as appears before the eyes of us all, yet finds its way into her mind and out again as art to reassert and interpret itself in the most surprising ways! Premiered at Rosenthal's solo show "Existential Cartoons", L-Gallery, Moscow, in 2006.

In "PREGNANCY DREAMS" Barbara Rosenthal, nude and nine months pregnant, reads from her Journal dreams of filthy bathrooms, impeccably clothed men, and other parallels. Originally shot in Super-8 film by Bill Creston (seen nude in the mirror with his camera on this very hot August day) as tests of filmstocks for his recording of the birth and subsequent film "OLA: A FILM BY HER FATHER", "PREGNANCY DREAMS" was greeted by calls of outrage when premiered at BACA (The Brooklyn Arts and Cultural Association) in 1979, but digitally remastered in 2005, it has gained an increasingly receptive audience through the years.

The 33 shorts in 72 minutes comprising "33 EXISTENTIAL VIDEO SHORTS" was compiled for Barbara Rosenthal's solo mini-retrospective in video at the Z-Bar Screening Room in Berlin by curator Klaus Eisenlohr for Directors Lounge Contemporary Art And Media, on June 25, 2009. Included in this screening, an on this DVD, is the world premiere of "Dead Heat" as well as some of her best-known and rarely shown shorts, in 3 sections: 1. SOLO PERFORMANCE VIDEOS: "Barbara Rosenthal Contemplates Suicide", "Words Come Out Backwards", "Whispering Confession", "I Have a New York Accent", "I've Got the World in the Palm of My Hand", "Breaking Glass", "Lying Diary/Provocation Cards", "Handwriting Analysis", "How Much Does the Monkey Count", "How Much Does the Monkey Remember", "Video Will", "Society", "News Wall", "Pregnancy Dreams"; 2. PLAYING WITH OTHERS: "Playing With Matches", "Shadow Boxes", "Mandates for Art", "News to Fit the Family", "Nonsense Conversation", "Rock-A-Bye Rock Lobster", "Colors and Auras"; 3. CONCEPTUAL VIDEOS WITH TEXT, NEWS AND GAMES ABOUT DIMENSION, DURATION, TIME, PHYSICS, LOCATION AND RELATIONSHIP: "Dog Recognition", "Quotation from Paul Gauguin/This is Not a Book", "The Screen Will Be Black and Silent", "Siddhartha", "World View", "Space and Time", "A Boy and His Father Butcher a Deer", "Dead Heat", "American Denominations", "Vienna Photos", "Something from Oliver North". LIMITED EDITION OF 30, SIGNED AND NUMBERED

Compiled for Barbara Rosenthal's solo screening in Berlin at Lettretage - Das junge Literaturhaus in Feb., 2010, "EXISTENTIAL WORD PLAY" is a series of 34 zany shorts which all use text, speech, nonsense and bizarre audio to play with the notion that communication may not be possible at all, no matter how hard we try... Includes remastered works since 1982, plus four premieres: "Feet Handoff," "Rules," and the most harrowing two, "Push Me" and "Secret Codes." Four include German, and one Yiddish. Features Ola Creston, Sena Clara Creston, Bill Creston and the late poet Hannah Weiner, plus audio segments by German experimental composers DJ RoBeat and Brandstifter. The full program, and this DVD, comprise the following shorts, in this order: "Lettering Too Big", "Secret Of Life", "Nancy and Sluggo", "A Boy and His Father Butcher a Deer", "Boggle", "Paths To Follow", "Words Come Out Backwards", "Quotation from Paul Gauguin, "This Is A", "Dog Recognition", "Postcards", "Rules/Regeln", "Space and Time", "World View", "Names and Faces", "Siddhartha", "Black and Silent", "Whispering Confession", "Secret Codes", "Push Me", "Burp Talk", "Daily News", "News To Fit The Family", "I Have a New York Accent", "Lying Diary/Provocation Cards", "Semaphore Poems", "News Wall", "Nonsense Conversation", "Society", "How Much Does the Monkey Remember", "Feet Handoff", "Pregnancy Dreams", and "Handwriting Analysis."

Babel / Letter to my Friends who Stayed in Belgium narrates the day-to-day existence of a filmmaker wandering through his city (Brussels) and who has a notion to follow in the footsteps of dramatist Antonin Artaud and visit the Tarahumara people of Mexico. This is a film about intimacy and friendship. Written in the first person, it places Boris and Brussels in the center of the universe, here represented by the crazy, vertiginous, endless spiral of the biblical Tower. It is Boris’s diary and self-portrait. He plays himself on screen (as do the cast of a hundred who also allowed themselves to be “Babelized”)
Contains the entire film on 3 DVDs, the 160-page book and the poster.

An attempt to provide an introduction to the Germany period of my life, from 1944 to October 1949. Using original photos from the period, taken by myself and my brother Adolfas, and film/video footage from 1971 and 1993, I revisit Elmshorm, Flensburg, Wiesbaden, Mainz and Kassel where I spent five years of my life -- first as a Forced Laborer in a war prisoners camp, and later as a Discplaced Person in displaced persons camps. The soundtrack consists of brief excerpts from my written diaries of that period, current reflections and passages from the writings of Wolfgang Borchert. - J.M.

A motion picture composed of brief diaristic scenes not used in completed films from the years 1960-2000; and self-referential video footage taped during the editing. Brief glimpses of family, friends, girl-friends, the City, seasons of the year, travels. Occasionally I talk, reminisce, or play music I taped during those earlier years, plus more recent piano improvisations by Auguste Varkalis. It's a kind of autobiographical, diaristic poem, celebration of happiness and life. I consider myself a happy man. - J.M.

Klando-
I began to think about Brakhage's opening paragraph for Metaphors on Vision and his notion of the untutored eye and although I could sympathize with sentiment, my experience with my own daughter Maddy seemed more concrete. Sometime after September 11, 2001, having been displaced and re-settled temporarily in a furnished apartment in Maplewood, New Jersey, Maddy began reading stories from picture books. At four, she knew how to read a few words but mostly made up stories from looking at pictures. This video is my portrait of her and more, which began in a small industrial city about twenty minutes from Prague, Kladno, early one summer in the year 2000. -Weisman
The Fugitive Chef
The deaths of the filmmaker Bob Fleischner, my childhood friend Jeff Tenzer and my father Marc Weisman in 1989 hastened an already made decision to leave the avant-garde art community and seek respite elsewhere. This resolution didn't alter my desire to work at filmmaking or even attempt, occasionally, to alter its known forms; it simply restated it within a different context. The Fugitive Chef is a fractured and layered personal documentary shot mostly in Brooklyn and at the MacDowell Art Colony. Contributors to this film incldue filmmaker Bob Fleishner, poet Julia Kasdorf, painter Sarah McCoubrey, actor Scotty Snyder and filmmaker/performance artist Stuart Sherman. -Weisman
Our Trembling Way
Unlike one trend today in experimental film, it does not go about its work distilling or deconstructing. Rather it sets its sights on encompassing several interacting stories and visual tropes at once, including a man's trip to a hospital and a woman's trip to the movies, and blends them in celebration of cinema from both a narrative and non-narrative point of view. Utilizing found and originally recorded footage from both film and video sources, this film offers it's audience an opportunity to consider, in a mildly ironic manner, what it is to be mortal on this planet, as well as what it is to be both an observer and the observed. It is a lyrical tone poem, a fictional short story and a dance film and video light and shadow re-interpreted as a digital moving picture. -Stephen Anker, Dean, California Institute of the Arts

Inspired by the hyperbolic prose of notorious celebrity fetishist, Mercedes de Acosta, this film poses questions about truth, identity, and desire.

Film Synopsis:
Mercedes, Here Lies the Heart is dedicated to the memory of poet, novelist, playwright, and Hollywood screenwriter, Mercedes de Acosta. Mercedes is inspired by De Acosta's own published memoirs, Here Lies the Heart (1960) in which De Acosta obsessively lists her impressive cache of celebrity acquaintances (including Elenora Duse, Isadora Duncan, Alice B. Toklas, Marlene Deitrich, and Greta Garbo, among others). The film borrows De Acosta's hyperbolic stylistics to move through archival footage, narrative fantasy sequences, and dramatic "reenactments" in manic combination of varied genre forms. While highlighting De Acosta's distinctive passions for celebrity and her own sexual, ethnic, and spiritual entanglements, Mercedes poses questions about biographical structure and autobiographical representation, history and fantasy, identity and desire.

"At once an insightful deconstruction of stardom and biography, and a wry camp appreciation of their value, Mercedes, Here Lies the Heart is witty, artful, and original."
--Steven Cohan, author of Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (1997)and editor of Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader (2002).

"Mercedes, Here Lies the Heart is exhaustively researched and combines original as well as archival footage, mixing documentary, fiction and fantasy. Using idioms of fan culture and voyeurism, rendered in a polyvalent form, Friedling contributes to a rich tradition of filmmakers who have experimented with gender and personal narrative. What makes Friedling's work distinctive is her use of a marginal figure such as Mercedes (who nevertheless perceives herself as central to various historical events). The director does not permit us identification with this figure, but allows her to become the point from which to launch a series of mini-essays and vignettes at break-neck speed. Mercedes' story becomes as much about her as it is about the paucity of truth, the fertility of imagination, the charm of media images, the crisis of lesbian desire and a melancholic search for meaning. . . Mercedes lives her life as a tissue of lies which lead her to an equally flawed, highly Orientalizing, moment of truth . . . In subtle ways, the film makes her fabrications a mockery of the worlds inhabited by her glamorous ex-lovers Garbo and Dietrich; a world that remains inaccessible to Mercedes in any real terms. By turning the limitations of her (marginal) protagonists into a meditation on society at large, I would argue that Friedling goes further than a previous generation of feminist filmmakers who explored women's valorization of personal narrative when confronted with the impossibility of female self-expression within patriarchy. Friedling affectionately celebrates narratives of failure and error, which are compelling for their insistent, if doomed, alternative takes on reality."
-Priya Jaikumar, Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television and author of Cinema at the End of Empire: Britain and India, 1927-1947 (2006).

Made towards the end of my tenure as a grunt worker in a film processing lab, at a time when I was spending most of my days slacking off down in the lab's sub basement playing with raw film stock and reversal chemicals. This was a fairly disgusting space with dirt floors and four-foot ceilings from which the leaking guts hung down from the operation above, but it was open, and I could stretch out full 100' foot rolls of film from end to end on the floor. From there, I could freely apply developers, bleaches and fixers in whatever ways I could think of, usually mashing in the dust, leaves, and garbage that was kicked up in the process. -JL

"I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy's and her sister Lee Radziwill's families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship." -Jonas Mekas

"On October 9th, 1972, half of the music world gathered in Syracuse, N.Y., to celebrate the opening of John Lennon/Yoko Ono Fluxus show, designed by George Maciunas. Same day, a smaller group gathered in a local hotel room to celebrate John's birthday." - Jonas Mekas

An ongoing series of investigations that attempt to penetrate film's enigmatic materiality in tandem with the vagaries of my own emotional and psychological states. Each installment consists of a single 100' roll of 16mm black and white film stock exposed with simple vertical lines that follow the natural trajectory of the film strip. Working under red light, the emulsion is then treated by hand with various chemical applications, giving the strip it its color, texture, and sense of movement. Although an idea of progress from roll to roll is not necessarily an objective, I do have sense that working and struggling with the material in this way will symbiotically further my understanding of what film is made of, and what I am made of. -JL

A documentation of long walks throughout Berlin, Germany during the cold days of April, 2013. The footage is composed of single frames along with longer moments of glance. The title comes from a short story by Robert Walser.

"It has been widely reported that prisoners confined to dark cells often see brilliant light displays, which is sometimes called the "prisoner's cinema. [...] The brain contains many (perhaps an infinite number) of feedback loops. One of these involves a pathway between a part of the frontal lobe of the brain, which extends through the cingulate gyrus, caudate nucleus and down to the thalamus. This particular pathway is associated with the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is involved in many biological processes, including those of depression and sleep." -Salvatore Cullari.

I hand spliced this project until my computer crashed. It should induce alpha and delta states, the brain states of the hyper aware and the comatose. For my mother.

Dedicated to my father, who asked that I make a more colourful work. Made during my residency at the now defunct Experimental Television Center, "Burning Star" is a colourful implo/explosion of the twelve sided star. The title refers to Kenji Onishi's "A Burning Star." -Joshua Gen Solondz

A poet of the poet, filmmaker, editor, and avant-gardism Charles Henri Ford.

"[This] glimpse of a close-knit, trans-Atlantic salon elite morphing over several decades is absorbing for the links revealed between each modernist epoch. Wealth of archived materials on tap (not least Ford's own portrait photography) makes near-mythic cultural figures and events seem teasingly immediate. Especially intriguing is an extended section about the elaborate 'Paper Ball' Tschelitchew devised for a Hartford, Conn., museum in 1936, as it suggests multimedia 'happenings' were hardly a 1960s invention." -Variety

"A superb film, filled with witty glimpses of the illustrious..." -LA Times

What is the definition of a contemporary family? Who make the best parents? what are the implications of recent advances in biology and how will these affect the ways human beings choose to reproduce? These questions and many others are examined through the experience of the filmmakers James Dowell and John Kolomvakis as they proceed through the process of surrogacy and family building ultimately ending in their twin sons. The specific history that lead to this desirefor family is explored through the filmmakers' life experience and the viewer is offered a window onto the changing social mores of the last half century.

Shot in black and white super-8 film, the short loosely follows one Chinese American girl as she finds her way down to Chinatown in New York City. The girl has an obvious relationship with the camerawoman, and both the girl and the camerawoman float in and out of the frame as images of the street life in Chinatown take precedence. There is a sense of adventure but mostly nostalgia. The loose narrative is interrupted by a scene of a mango being sliced open. The music begins again and so do the images of Chinatown. At the end of the film, we see the Chinese American girl again, but this time she is indoors and packing. The music gets heavier and then the film cuts out. -ALK

Notes For A Polish Jew (2012) 8 min, 16mm, silent. If his father had lived beyond the age of seventy-four, the following may have been the cinematic response to the city where in 1944, he last saw his family. Filmed in the mid-1980s, Lodz, Poland. Constructed in 2012, Florence, MA. USA.

From Prague to Poland (2010) 15 min, DVD, sound. Sixty years after his familys departure from Poland, the filmmaker returns to the city where he was born.

What My Father Would Have Seen In Poland (2010) 54 min, DVD, sound. A contemporary, on-line archive of Polish amateur films made between the 1950s - 1980s, provides an opportunity to reflect on stories of survival and attempts at reconciliation.

non-Aryan (2009) 12 min, silent, color, 16mm. A recent article in the NYT revealed that during the 1930s and 1940s administrators at Columbia University restricted the hiring of refugee, Jewish medical doctors by severely limited the number of "non-Aryans" on their staff. Inspired by that revelation, the following is a cinematic tribute, a portrait of another "non-Aryan" who was not a physician and arrived in the USA in 1955.

Trepches (2009) 7 min, silent, beta. In the process of making "The March" (1999), my mother spoke about the wooden shoes she and other inmates wore n their forced march out of Auschwitz. She called them "trephes." Utilizing one of the optically printed segments from "The March," I've re-visited that filmmaking experience and our exchange.

Half Sister (1985) 22 min, color, sound, 16mm. A recently discovered photograph of my half sister, who was killed in the German concentration camp of Auschwitz, inspires the imagination to conceive a life that would have been.

In Memory (1933) 13 min, B&W, sound, 16mm In Memory, is a tribute, a projected memorial to members of my family and all those who died under Nazi occupation.

The March (1999) 25 min, color & B&W, sound, 16mm Utilizing a series of conversation conducted over a thirteen-year period between the filmmaker and his mother, The March, details Fela Ravett's recollections of the 1945 Death March from Auschwitz.

An American woman calls her Italian lover and leaves a message reciting his poetry. Poem is "L’Anguilla” by Euqenio Montale. Imagined of the real relationship between Montale and Ima Brandeis. Montale wrote of a figure called “Clizia” who was inspired by Brandeis.

I would like to examine the cumaean sibyl through the lens of a phrase decayed through a repetitive everyday ritual of care as an act of resistance to the aging body. - Angeli Sion

I have seen with my own eyes the sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her. What do you want? She answered, I want to die.
-- On Cumaean Sibyl, Petronius in Satyricon, epigraph of T.S Eliots The Waste Land

A video in which masked performer Sahar Sepahdari-Dalai interprets a poem she has written while engaging with green-screened environments made of cutout paper. Rooted in our relationship to language, the video becomes a place where childhood and adulthood collapse into nonsensical freeform.

A literal translation of birth, through facial gestures and silent alliteration of non-existing words, aimed to interpret our sense of language as sound. The performers face is green-screened with what is revealed as a live birth.

Lost our Lease was filmed during working hours going from here to there in and out of a work van playing hooky and the title was given to me. It was shot and edited around 10 years ago and the title was given to me from the street. -J.J.
"Lost our Lease" was filmed during working hours going from here to there in and out of a work van playing hooky. It was shot and edited around 10 years ago and the title was given to me from the street."
-Jim Jennings, catalogue of New York Film Festival’s "Views from the Avant Garde"
"When this film was screened at the New York Film Festival, Jennings expressed the desire to continue to shoot films in New York City "until the last of the sweatshops is turned into a luxury apartment." This film captures the "sign" of our times, the "Lost Our Lease" sign in the window of a humble storefront. We become aware of the beauty of the vulnerable, remaining patches of gritty New York. Nevertheless, the film is not "about" gentrification or materialism or any such matters. It exceeds the limits of social commentary and ventures into a realm timeless and exquisite.
-Karen Treanor

LOOPER is an archival Easter egg hunt spanning over 33 years and 6047 miles. The connecting element between 16mm footage shot in Long Beach, CA and Super 8mm material shot in Salzburg, Austria is the little girl and grown women - my mother.

What is the definition of family? Who makes the best parents? What are the implications of recent advances in biology and how will those effect the ways human beings choose to reproduce? Those questions and many others are examined through the experience of the filmmakers James Dowell and John Kolomvakis as they proceed through the process of surrogency and family building in the feature documentary film, OUR NEW FAMILY.

Ultimately culminating in their twin sons, the specific history that lead to this desire for family is explored through the filmmakers' lives and a view is offered on to the changing social mores over the last half century. Gay marriage and parenting are examined as well as the challenging of specific environment of Dallas, Texas and New York City. Interviews include: Dennis Coleman, Executive Director of Equality and Jennifer Chrisler, Executive Director of Family Equality Council. Stuart Miller, C.E.O of Growing Generations are interviewed as are the surrogate mother and egg donor. A wide swath of the history of the last fifty years is seen through the eyes of the filmmakers and the present of a new kind of family give a specific report on where we are today.

In this self-reflexive film, Ann Deborah Levy's camera captures compelling images of a mysterious wilderness lake and its elegant swans. The water serves as a canvas on which upside-down reflections of trees, clouds, and colors in the landscape are acted upon by wind and light to make an ever-changing painting. Against these images and painted illustrations, a woman making a film on swans serves as the focus for an exploration of perceptions of reality as filtered through the human mind in science, mythology, art, and documentary filmmaking; a meditation on illusion and reality.
Off-screen voices personify the woman's thoughts as she shoots her film and researches and shapes her script: the filmmaker reads from her shooting diary; young girls recount swan myths; a scholar discusses swan symbolism; and supposed 'experts' from across history debate whether swans really sing or not before they die. These distinct yet thematically related scenarios interweave throughout, but never intersect. They float like elements in a dream for the viewer to connect and interpret later on.

For the first three years of her twin niece's and nephew's lives, Lynne Sachs used her 16mm Bolex camera to film them growing up in New York City with two dads and a mom. The film ends with a Gay Pride Day embrace.

Lynne Sachs with Sean Hanley.
Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier's text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns illuminate twenty-five years of rediscovered film journeys.
NYC poet Paolo Javier invited filmmaker Lynne Sachs to create a film that would speak to one of his poems from his newly published book Court of the Dragon (Nightboat Books). Sachs chose Stanza 10 from Javier's poem "Starfish Aorta Colussus". She then decided to collaborate with film artist Sean Hanley in the editing of the film. Together, they traveled through 25 years of unsplit Regular 8 mm film that Sachs had shot -- including footage of the A.I.D.S. Quilt from the late 1980s, a drive from Florida to San Francisco, and a journey into a very untouristic part of Puerto Rico.

The Onteora mascot struggle quickly became a national story with coverage in Newsweek Magazine as well as the New York Times. It was featured on CNN, in newspapers from coast to coast, and in articles on the internet - while the filmmakers found themselves right in the middle of it all. There are more than 14,000 school boards in the United States, and they are often called the heart of American democracy.

Co-producer, Meg Carey, was elected to the Onteora Board of Education in 1998. She anticipated a three-year term working to improve student achievement. Her husband, Tobe Carey, was videotaping the board meeting for local libraries and showings on public access TV when the Indian mascot fight broke out. For three years, Carey continued to record district events including the chaotic school board meetings, the politics surrounding the mascot issue and the community turmoil that followed.

During this time, anti-Semitic hate articles appeared on the internet, physical threats were made, an election-night shoving match occurred, tires were punctured, and an intense political struggle consumed the school board and the district. School Board Blues reveals all this and more in a local story with important national implications.

From the archives of the late 1960's and early 1970's comes this period piece. A combination of two 16mm experimental films, "The True Light Beaver Film: After the Revolution", and "Family Astrology".

The True Light Beaver Film: After the Revolution - 13 minutes, 1970
This program provides an intimate glimpse into communal ways and ritual at the height of the counter culture. Includes cameo appearances by Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner of Yippie! fame.

Family Astrology - 34 minutes, 1975
A look at hippie family life at its fullest through a lens of astrology. Life with chickens, music and much more.

Experimenting with on-camera memoir. Facing the camera. I was going to be 35 years old...with my father's diagnosis of terminal cancer... in a reel to reel live on-camera set up with intercut video and super-eight film.

The late Stanley Kunitz, Poet Laureate of the United States in 2000, wrote many poems about growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the house in which he lived as a child. Some of the Pulitzer Prize winner's most memorable poetry illuminates his family, the search for his father who committed suicide six-weeks before he was born, his house, the neighborhood and his sense of place in Worcester. The 1918 classic Worcester three-decker house in which he lived now bears a plaque proclaiming the site's importance in Stanley's Kunitz's life while growing up.

My name is Tobe Carey. I'm a filmmaker, and I grew up in this same house some thirty years after Stanley. From the 2nd grade on I lived there until going to college in 1960. Up until a few years ago I knew nothing about Stanley Kunitz's poetry or the Kunitz's family history. Only then did I discover the connection with childhoods spend in and around our house.

In 2006, when I videotaped Stanley Kunitz in his New York City apartment, he read four Worcester poems and then off-camera he remarked, "That house still has a hold on both of us." Stanley Kunitz was 100 years old when he died four days later on Mother's Day, 2006.

In another of her absurdist identity conceptual-performance videos, Barbara Rosenthal is challenged by NY videographer/poet Mitch Corber during casual descriptive wordplay conversation in his studio, to describe her own eyebrows without looking in the mirror. Because there was an unnamed, anonymous individual sitting next to her during the shoot, Rosenthal edited the piece to exclude his image and other distractions, resulting in yet another of Rosenthal's unique uses of the video-screen surface.

The I Ching AKA, the Chinese BOOK OF CHANGES, is a "reflection of the universe in miniature." It allows one to connect with such energy thru philosophy and inquiry. Its 64 hexagrams describe typical but different states of energy found in life. It uses elements of Nature to describe different types of forces, each with their own qualities (example: wind is "penetrating" yet "gentle"). My practice is intuitive action, taken after researching the I CHING hexagram. I use color to stand for the elements of thunder (for the top trigram - red shirt) which occurs over lightning/fire (for bottom trigram - white pants). #55 means CITADEL, or CANOPY (under heaven), also ABUNDANCE and (reaching) the ZENITH, which cannot be maintained. As no ZENITH can ever last, at the peak the movement we tip over into the next hexagram, in THE HOUSE OF WATER/ HOUSE of the ABYSSMAL: #36 DARKNESS.
#55 is about expanded intelligence, portraying an energetic movement. In #55, an offering of rice grain supports the crossing over into victory."Crossing the bridge" is engaging the enemy. This hexagram was pulled by King Wu, who avenged his father King Wen. King Wen is said to have written the philosophy of the I CHING after being imprisoned by the Shang Dynasty leaders. He died in their prison. King Wu inquired of the I CHING what action he should take while entering the mourning period for his father. It advised against staying still. At the time of King Wu's inquiry, there was an eclipse and the pole stars were seen at noon. He entered the battlefield of war with his father's coffin accompanying him and his troops. They defeated the SHANG.

Performative Super 8 manipulation to Digital Projection.
Saudade is a word in Portuguese and Galician that claims no direct translation in English. It describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone. It often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return. Its the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone or something that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. It brings sad and happy feelings all together, sadness for missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling.
Through each showing, the film is manipulated live through a series of analog to digital processes. Originally a performance ritual act where the artist tries to control their body through a single repetitive motion and documented in Super 8mm. Inspired by the process of film, Saudade becomes a hypnotic trance of the moving body as an internal dialog of intentions, desires and experiences are exposed. Each film screening is unique and highlights different aspects of the film.
PHOTOSENSITIVITY WARNING.
Camera: Nung-Hsin Hu

The Talking Tea-Kettle , inserted in your ear, speaks with the voice of the dead. Why would we want to listen? Videographer Terese Svoboda considers this question while relating how Houdini and Nebraska magician David P. Abbott stamped out the practice of mediums in the early years of the twentieth century, with the videographer's shout-out to her own mother.

To See or Not to See is a meditation on the Giant Walking Sticks of Papua New Guinea which dramatizes the narrator's ambivalence toward the Other. The tape acts as a visual interpretation of anthropologist Clifford Geertz' examination of language and how it traps the speaker's attempts at trying to interpret. In 'To See or Not to See' the dilemma of the outside observer becomes exposed -- with wit, irony and a genuine concern for not destroying what is seen.

Using the interview of Mohammed Kubwa taken several years after his incarceration by the Mossad, his printed testimony, footage of the terrorist and the Nairobi bombing, emails from the jailed Mohammed Kubwa and his interview, a NY Times article about the saline well and its uses in combating terrorism, interviews with Major Brice Finney who didn't fix the well, footage of Mafia women at trials, clips from True Lies, a visual examination of purdah and polygamy, arguments between us, Well? plumbs the depths of the bond between brother and sister, man and wife, stranger and stranger, exploring a secret so huge the Mossad couldn't believe "The Chameleon" could get away with it.

Hema is an intimate exploration of the female body's special connection with the ebb and flow of the universe, and it's crucial involvement in the direct replenishment, nourishment and care for natural rebirth and growth. The title of this work is a play on 'hemoglobin', the red protein responsible for moving oxygen through the blood of vertebrates. Much like hemoglobin directly influences the successful function of our lifeblood, it is my view that women are direct influencers on the successful function of reproducing in both the maternal-spiritual sense as well as the physical act. Our bodies are powerful vessels and this work intends to highlight the magical elements within the female body through the eyes of a queer woman who lives in a physical-spiritual place of empowerment, confidence and pride in mind and body. By focusing on this character's fetishization of the menstruation process, Hema seeks to empower women to be universally proud of the miracle nature provides the female form as it cycles through existence, and to share this recognition of power with other women in their lives as they see fit.

Faith and John Hubley. Two sisters engage in imaginative pre-bedtime play. As the girls explore their parents' bedroom and bathroom, they experience a range of emotions from intense anger to loving tenderness.

"PAST PERFECT is a meditation on Jewish history, notably the
Shoah-spirited and darkly amusing... In PAST PERFECT
Madansky manages - frequently, brilliantly - to evoke a similar
pang as greets the historian, documentarian, genealogist, or
traveler when confronting the catastrophic absence that is the
Holocaust. When all is effaced, the only logical response is
speculation." excerpt from text by David Rakoff

A sparing and minimal travelogue of Istanbul. A foreigner
meditates on the unraveling of a relationship while moving from
hotel room to hotel room. In a city simultaneously devoted to Islam
and secular nationalism, she finds refuge in the frailty and severity
of the rituals of devotion.

Still Life gazes unflinchingly at the violence of war, observing the
eerie architecture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip collapsed under
Israeli occupation. This portrait provides brutal witness to how
government sanctioned destruction metes upon structures of
home and State. Unlike the mediated images of current warfare,
Still Life examines the effects of the destruction of Occupation
through the details of cinematic landscapes and its inherent
inhabitants. In its relentless questioning reaffirmed with a unique
and unremitting soundtrack by composer Zeena Parkins, Still Life
forces us to focus on details of devastation.

Dear features the interior world of two teenage Chinese girls in New
York City, whose diary entries reveal their concerns related to growing
up as immigrants amidst the ever-gentrifying landscape of Chinatown.

VIVA ÁGUA is a meditation on the philosophical work entitled
ÁGUA VIVA written by Clarice Lispector in 1973. The film reflects
on Lispector's interior experimental monologue on the "instant-
now" of time, the discomforts of language which are "beyond
thought" and the harmonious dissonant reminders and remainders
of that "sometime what is seen is ineffable."

(self-portrait: TEXTures of a path)
Who am I?
Am I anymore that a collective portrait of all the glances I have received?
I am all the words that you have said about me?
Am I your hatred when you look at me and condemn me to abyss?
Am I your love when you look at me and you give me heaven?
I am in your eyes.
I am in all eyes and I am not in any
I am what your eyes want to see
That is why I walk, I walk, I walk
I walk to uproot the feet of false beliefs,
to move the thought,
and for the truth to fall by its own weight.
To return the body as the only truth,
To hear the beat of my heart as the only horizon.
Who I am ?,
I know now that I am the one who walks.
I walk to be able to walk, to be able to be.
And share the experience of my eyes, the "texture of a WAY" with you.
Since now I know it would be nothing without you.
After 18 moves (post burned my house) I arrive to Les Fonts (Barcelona) where
my mother was born. The emotional impact and the sensations invaded all my
skin.
There is so much density in the Pandora's moving boxes of my voluntary and
involuntary memories that can not defragment my hard drive now for constructing
an intelligible and linear narrative about my self.
"TEXTures of a path" was established as a few small democratic "units of
meaning" made from text and audio notes that I have been doing, over more than
a year, during my walks to Les Fonts, and something of some box ...
Where the images and texts are superimposed to weave a visual texture that
lead to the view the experiences and inner-feelings, to "feel" the skin eye audio-
visuals.

In this series I work with democratic information devices. I transform the noise of all devices on a subjective poetic gaze. That contrasts with the objective eye of the informational language. I was recently installed in the village where my mother was born, I was without wifi nor television. As the only entertainment I was contemplating the trees in my front door. One night I experienced the spectacle of nature with me Fireworks storm. So I filmed my first storm in "Les Fonts" (sources) with all devices that I had "hand": mobile, desktop, and was not professional photo camera...and I made an assembly with textures I was offered the different images and sounds to create a visual and auditory rhythm. As if lightning storm allowed draw of the dark night of oblivion, the ghosts of the memory of my origins. Or as if, for a moment, return to the present deconstructed snapshots in time did lose all its original clarity and sharpness.

Can be shown silent, with a live score or with sound on a CD
Harbour City (2016) // 16mm, Dual Projection, Colour & B/W, 14 minutes, 2016 // Music by Warren Ng & Ben Hozie // Shot in Hong Kong & Stoke-On-Trent /// Hand Printed and Processed at Negativland Motion Picture Film Lab, Brooklyn //// A view through cracks between fish markets and high-rise buildings; urban imagery of Hong Kong and the indulgence of domestic life. Massage parlors, dim sum parlors, nail parlors —its Parlor City, baby! Views thicken; detail lost to generations. A dream of turning two images into one, a density of information reserved for the modern cloud.

This is Carolina Mandia's first film. It's a city-scape documenting the commute from her home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to her job in Midtown Manhattan and back. Overwhelmed with anxiety from the fast paced environment she lives in, the filmmaker finds refuge in daydreaming.

As she moves from Brazil to NY, the filmmaker looks back at her grandma's migration as a way to find traces of her own identity. The foreign yet intimate look at NYC and its inhabitants unfolds into a visual letter as she collects images of her new surroundings.

Shot in black and white super-8 film, the short loosely follows one Chinese American girl as she finds her way down to Chinatown in New York City. The girl has an obvious relationship with the camerawoman, and both the girl and the camerawoman float in and out of frame as the images of the street life in Chinatown take precedence. There is a sense of adventure but mostly nostalgia. The loose narrative is interrupted by a scene of a mango being sliced open. the music begins again and so do the images of Chinatown. At the end of the film, we see the Chinese American girl again, but this time she is indoors and packing. The music gets heavier and then the film cuts out.

AUTOGRAPH
1976, 2 minutes, silent
A simple performance that prefigures the work I do now.
DAFFODILS
1977, 3 minutes, silent
A love poem to my husband in the early days of our romance
DRAWING BREATH
1978, 3 minutes
DOT SQUARED
1977, 3 minutes
A camera roll of Bill Brand, animating his computer graphics, using the mainframe at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
TYRONE, PA
1977, 14 minutes
A portrait of car culture and the town where I grew up.
AT THE GRANDPARENTS
1978, 5 minutes
BILL'S FILM SHOOT
1978, 7 minutes
FLOWERS AND BIRDS
1979, 8 minutes
On vacation with Bill's mother who loved watching birds. At the time, I was steeped in Japanese aesthetics and the pleasure of looking.
APPLE BUTTER BOIL
1979, 8 minutes
A two-day ritual that took place every fall at the Grange next door to my house.

SKINSIDE OUT
by Katy Martin and Bill Brand
2002, 16mm film, 11 minutes.
A private, interior world takes shape within the coded context of shared urban space, as images from the studio are juxtaposed with footage of a construction barge along the Hudson River. By examining both in relation to surface, the work paradoxically looks for what lies within.
GUILIN ROAD
by Katy Martin
2005, 16mm film
SWAN'S ISLAND
by Bill Brand and Katy Martin
2005, 16mm film, 5 minutes
SWAN'S ISLAND focuses on gesture in painting, and how that relates to the hand-held camera. The emphasis is on the physicality of painting, and its visceral connection to memory and imagination. Here, the movement of the artist's hand is expanded to include the entire body.
The film is about gesture as a kind of performance. Katy paints directly on her skin, and as she moves, leaves marks on the floor. Bill films the body and its trace, linking his own movement with cinematic space.
SWAN'S ISLAND explores the act of seeing as inextricable with that of being seen.